 Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Mike Gallagher. I'm the Councilman for District 10. We also, believe it or not, have another Councilman here today. Have any of you heard of Joe Crier? Joe, stand up. Let everybody see you there. If Joe looks a little worn, he's been through a campaign like nobody's business. Congratulations, Joe. Great victory for you. That really was. We also have with us our city manager, Cheryl Scully. Cheryl, where are you? There you go. I want to make sure everybody sees her. Something that makes me so proud. And I've said this before, if you want to hold a meeting that's got neighborhood leaders in it, come out to District 10. You're going to get the biggest turnout you're going to anywhere in the city. So I just want to thank everybody for being here tonight. This is a very important time for us. What Cheryl's got to put up with is not easy. You think about how we're growing as a city. You think about all of the expenses that we're going to have to endure and the reason we're here is to figure out not only what we should be spending that money on, but also if necessary, what we've got to cut. This is not an easy process. So we really do appreciate the fact. I wanted you to have a voice in this process and it looks like this is set up so we can do that. So ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming and now I'm going to turn it over to Cheryl. Thank you, Mike. And we're happy to be here tonight back in District 10. And I know we have some returning veterans who have been here every year that we've been doing this for the past eight or nine years. So thank you for your loyalty and for coming back to meet with us and to give us your input on what you think should be included and how we should help the city council prioritize city services. So thank you for being here tonight. So here's what we're going to do on our program this evening. We have a number of city staff here and I'm going to, for those who are standing in the back, I see our police chief and we've got a number of parks, our parks directors here, Xavier, a number of city executive, wave your hand. City staff are stand if you're at a table. I know we have city staff at each of the table to help you and take notes and facilitate the conversation. So staff, thank you. Thanks for being here and all those that are standing in the back and we'll move around and answer questions that you might have as you're deliberating and giving us input. First, we're going to show you a very brief video that summarizes our budget, our $2.3 billion budget, what the components of that budget are and what we're asking you to do tonight is also to prioritize city services and help us. And we take this input, share it with all the council members and they will use it in their goal-setting session on Tuesday, May 27th where they'll talk about city priorities and give us direction so that we can prepare a budget and propose that in early August, reflecting their priorities with input from you. So we're going to begin with the video, talk about the budget, its components and then we'll come back and give a few instructions and give you a timeline on our evening of conversation. So let's roll the video and then we'll have a few more words. The many services provided by the City of San Antonio are prioritized and funded through the adopted annual budget. This video will provide you with an overview of the many services provided by the city and explain how the city pays for these services. With an annual budget of $2.3 billion and 11,300 employees, the City of San Antonio strives to provide you with high quality services every day. So how does the city's budget work? The city's total budget is divided into separate funds including the general fund, restricted funds and the capital budget. The largest of these funds is the city's general fund which receives funding from four major sources of revenue. Property taxes, sales taxes, CPS energy revenues and other revenues. Property taxes represent the city's portion of the taxes you pay on your home and business. However, the city's portion of your total property tax bill is only about 25%. Sales taxes are collected on purchases made throughout the city and are dependent on the local economy. CPS energy provides a portion of its gross profits to the city as a return on investment and these revenues vary based on the south Texas weather. Finally, other revenues represent funding collected from user fees, licenses and permits. Together, these revenues support the majority of city services. Two-thirds of the total general fund budget is allocated to the police and fire departments. With more than 4,000 uniform personnel, the police and fire departments enforce the law, protect San Antonio residents, their families and their homes. The remaining one-third of the general fund resources support critical city services such as streets, parks, libraries, code enforcement, health and human services and animal care. The City of San Antonio is facing a financial challenge of $27 to $34 million in fiscal year 2015 in the general fund. Expenditures in the general fund are growing at a faster pace than general fund revenues. The financial challenges that the city faces in 2015 include the increased cost of providing healthcare benefits to uniform police and fire employees, maintaining a triple-aid bond rating, maintaining a balance between public safety and other services paid by the general fund and the many needs across the city, including street maintenance, new sidewalks, library services, human services and the maintenance of city facilities. In order to maintain a balanced budget in fiscal year 2015 as required by law, the city will have to prioritize services and redirect resources in the general fund. More than 66% of the general fund is allocated to the police and fire budget. If the community desires to maintain or increase the funds allocated to police and fire, other city services such as streets, parks, libraries, animal care, code enforcement and health and human services would have to be reduced. The city maintains more than 4,000 miles of streets, more than 400 miles of drainage infrastructure and more than 1,300 traffic signals. The maintenance and preservation of the city's streets and sidewalks is the responsibility of the city's transportation and capital improvements department. Each day, city employees work to preserve and maintain streets across San Antonio by filling in potholes as well as maintaining city drainage channels, adding bike lanes and building new sidewalks. The Parks and Recreation Department maintains 244 parks, 14,816 acres of parkland, 145 miles of trails, 24 outdoor pools and 29 community centers throughout the city. San Antonio's 26 libraries provide residents of all ages access to books, computers and educational programs. Through the libraries, you can receive live homework assistance and download e-books, audiobooks, music and videos for free. The Animal Care Services Department is committed to improving outcomes for San Antonio's pet population through increased education, adoptions and enforcement. For the current fiscal year, resources were added to increase spay-neuter surgeries, enhance licensing awareness and reduce the number of loose and stray animals. As a result of these additional resources and many other efforts by the Animal Care Services Department, the city has been able to increase its live pet release rate from 30% in 2011 to 80% today. The city provides code enforcement officers who work throughout San Antonio to maintain the safety and integrity of our neighborhoods. These officers enforce the city's property maintenance code, address concerns caused by unoccupied and dilapidated structures and help prevent and abate graffiti. Other important city services are funded by restricted funds that are not supported by property tax revenue. The rates and fees that support services paid by restricted funds cannot be used to pay for services in the general fund such as police, fire, streets or code enforcement. Services paid by restricted funds include garbage collection, review of new commercial and residential development permits, operations of the International Airport and the city's parking operations. Ensuring that the fiscal year 2015 budget is financially balanced and reflects the priorities of the community is a collaborative effort between residents, city leaders and city staff. The city wants to know which services matter most to you. Let us know your priorities by attending one of five community budget input hearings scheduled from May 19th to May 22nd. You can also provide your input through the city's budget input box located inside libraries, senior centers and online at www.sanantonio.gov slash budget. With your assistance, the City of San Antonio can continue to deliver high quality services to all residents in our great community. To an overview, we are required by law to maintain a balanced budget. So when you hear that we have a budget challenge of 27 to 34 million, that is within the general fund to do everything we're doing today based on the revenue we estimate we'll receive next year. That's how much we'd have to cut in the budget to balance the budget or identify other revenue sources to make up that difference. So when you hear that we talk about that this time of budget preparation and then when I present the budget that goes away. That's because we figure out how to cut the budget so that we live within our means. And the city councils have not increased the property tax rate for the city for 21 years. So, living within our means over the past decade we have, during my tenure as manager, I've recommended and the council's approved adding 400 police officers and firefighters a total of 473 to be exact and we've cut about 1200 civilian positions. And so as you think about our city growth and we're one of the fastest growing cities in the country we've added fire stations, we've added libraries, we've added hundreds of acres of additional park land over the past decade and yet we're doing it with fewer staff. That's because we're constantly looking at ways that we can provide the services in the best way possible to you the taxpayers who are paying the bills. So, tonight we want your input on how best to organize our budget and you may have heard a little bit about our conversation about public safety, police and fire healthcare and benefits and our contracts that we're talking with the employees about. And the reason to have that conversation is that we want our benefits to be fair but we also want them to be affordable to the taxpayers. And so we're trying to make changes that will allow us to have a fair compensation package but one that is also affordable to those of you who are paying. And we all know that all of us are paying something for healthcare. We're participating in the costs and it continues to grow every year. So we're proposing changes that would keep it fair as well as affordable. So tonight at your tables we have some instructions on what we'd like for you to do to help us get that input that we're seeking for budget preparation and I'm going to introduce Maria Villagomez, she'll give you those instructions we'll give you a time to have this conversation and then at the end we'll report out. If you'd identify a person at each of your tables to be the spokesperson for your group to talk about that which we've reached some consensus on in terms of your recommendations. Now how many of you have been to another budget meeting already this week? So we have some returning returning people, that's good. You may want to go around the table and just introduce yourselves to one another and talk about who if you're here to representing an organization a neighborhood group or one of our labor associations identify yourself for the group so that those sitting with you understand and know who you might be representing here this evening. I see Sally Scott and she's been very active on our animal care advisory board for many years thank you for your service. We have a number of volunteers here tonight so thank you. And Maria I'll turn it over to you for instructions. Thank you Cheryl. Well now that you have learned a little bit about the budget, how the budget process works and some of the challenges that we're facing next fiscal year now we want to hear from you. We want to know what are your priorities for the upcoming fiscal year so we have an exercise for you tonight that we will ask you to participate in and there are three questions that we're going to ask you. The first question as you heard in our general fund which is the largest operating fund of the city we are facing a financial challenge 27 to 34 million so in order to balance the budget we either have to reduce cost or increase revenue or a combination of the two. So the first question is what areas departments or programs would you be willing to reduce in the upcoming year so as we prepare the budget we can take those considerations into account the next question is are you willing to increase revenues for instance property taxes the property tax rate today has not been increased for the past 20 years if we were to increase our property taxes by one cent the city would be able to collect an additional 7.4 million dollars annually. The impact to the average homeowner is about $14 annually. The average homestead is about $134,000 that is just to give you some perspective on property tax or other rates or fees included in the general fund like parks fees alarm fees, EMS transport fees so those are revenues that perhaps we could increase to help us balance the budget so that is question two and then the last question is what areas would you like for us to consider enhancing or perhaps adding new programs as you heard we have this financial challenge so if we want to add something to the budget we have to prioritize within the existing services and perhaps there is a program that you may think is no longer a priority to the community and you would like to recommend to reprioritize those dollars to a higher priority of the community. So those are the three questions there is a director or assistant director are your table to help you with this process if there are any questions we have staff here to help you address those questions and you have 30 minutes for this exercise I will give you a reminder 10 minutes before the 30 minutes are up so thank you so much. If somebody wasn't able to attend this what other methods could they use to There's plenty of them one thing you can do is just go online to San Antonio dot gov and get the information about the budget another one is to go to your library and you can actually write your ideas and put them in a box there that can be collected and that will go into the process. Is this your first time doing this sort of thing? No, believe it or not because I've worked with neighborhoods we've been doing this for a long long time we always have shown up to these meetings and to tell what we think our priorities should be for the district and for the entire city. Do you enjoy it? It's really an interesting process. One of the things and all of us need to do this is to sit back for a moment and say what's really important? What should the money be being spent on? Thank you very much. Thank you. Good questions. Okay ladies and gentlemen it's time to wrap it up. Everybody ready? Alright everybody let's wrap it up. What we're going to do now is the best part of this is I hope everybody has picked a spokesman we're going to hear from each table we're going to get your report wake up everybody time out time out time out quiet please everybody quiet please very good got some teachers in here yeah let's make sure everybody be quiet we want to hear from each table now you've selected a spokesperson we'll start in the order of the table so look on your table to find out which table you are we're going to give everybody two minutes the staff is all ready to take numerous notes on the brilliant things we've come up with so we're going to start first with table one are you ready? We'll bring the microphone over to you. If you guys want to come over just talk to it. Good evening I'm not used to speaking with a microphone so this is something new for me. This is my first time to come to a budget session and what we have come up with here at table one in regards to increasing revenues is that we want to see about making equitable property taxes for all the businesses. We're not talking about raising any property taxes we're just talking about making people pay their fair share mainly in the commercial sector and another thing is fees we want to be able to collect fees we have things around the city that I think we could make more revenue on with making sure that we get fees for our garage sale permits making sure that we get fees for fines when like code enforcement goes out and we find a citizen for violations we want to make sure that we get fees on that we want to make sure that we get fees for animal control issues so we want to make sure that the fair share fees are being paid by not only the citizens but also the commercial sector and in our other general budget balancer we're looking at improvements we definitely need some improvements in our library system and we think maybe $250,000 improvement so we can keep the libraries open longer and more days because it just seems like the libraries keep getting closed sooner and sooner and sooner and we need these ability to educate these children out here by allowing them the proper time to go and get library services we definitely need street improvements I don't know if we can put a dollar amount onto that because there is so much street improvements that need to be done but streets and infrastructure need to occur I do not like driving on potholes and on bumpy streets and we need sidewalks in areas especially near schools and parks and on our next thing is animal care is very understaffed under resourced and I think we need to put more money into more officers and we need to include more education on our animal problem and I think we need to put more into our spay and neuter program having basically 10 zip codes that get free spay and neuter is not enough we need it to be for the entire city code enforcement we need more code enforcement officers it takes a long time to create a case for one individual to get fine $25 we need more resources out there we need more officers we need better equipment we running a shortfall you know one officer handles a big area so we do need to put some more money into our code enforcement because we do work hand in hand with animal care and animal care works hand in hand with us hand in hand with the rest of the city we want a better city a safer city and our next thing is we need quality jobs quality jobs cost money but in order to have good code enforcement, good animal care good library system we need to have cost of living increases we have to we have to keep our employees it's very costly when employees leave and we have to rehire new ones so it's very important that we do have quality jobs here in San Antonio and quality jobs means quality pay and quality benefits okay we gotta wrap it up for one because we gotta hear from the other tables so let's go ahead and go to table two thank you my name is Colette Galloway and I'm sure a lot of you here know me one of the things we talked about was that San Antonio was the seventh largest city in the country and we looked to being a world class city but we also think that saying that we haven't increased taxes for 20 years and we keep cutting things does not help make you a world class city you could only cut so much so we decided that we would like to see a two cent increase in the property taxes as they told us approximately $130,000 average home price that would be $14 for one cent so we're talking about about $28 a year for the average home we also thought that the city employees health benefits could have some improvement and there might be cost savings there and that working with the police and fire department to help restructure their health benefits could also result in savings we talked about long term vendor contracts where the contracts would require you to go to staples and buy something where you might be able to just run down to Costco or someplace else and get it for maybe 25 to 50 percent cheaper that there could be perhaps credit cards for a lot of things like this where the money amount is budgeted but you could go where you could get it cheaper studies by universities that we pay for we have quite a few number of universities colleges in San Antonio you always have doctoral students or master students that are looking for projects that need to do research that have to have something to provide for their graduation to get their degree rather than paying for a lot of these studies they can be used to do them and we would like to see the savings go to streets sidewalks and libraries our libraries are only open two nights a week for two hours the people who use the libraries need to be able to get to the library they may not be able to get to them on weekends so they need to have more time available to them we want to attract more industry more businesses to San Antonio yet we have areas even here on the north side that do not have sidewalks we have streets that are in pitiful condition we have areas in the older parts of the city that have sidewalks that are so broken up so overgrown that they can hardly be used by people a world-cast city doesn't have that thank you very much Coletta table three well a lot of what we would say is already said but I will say that we also after more than 20 years of no increase in property taxes we think it's time to bring us into the 21st century and raise them by a nickel so that would give us a pretty significant increase right there the other enhancement we would look for I don't want to upset the tea party members anymore than I have the other reductions we would look for reductions and let me back up here we would cut 10% from the parks department that's mainly in maintenance and that kind of thing okay well everybody every table gets their own whack at this you know that right let them talk let them talk alarm response time when the police have to come to a house for an alarm a false alarm we would charge more for the permit and more of the alarm company for their fee what would we do with the excess 40 million besides bring the budget into balance we would take the rest of it and put it on our streets you don't have to drive many of our streets to be embarrassed if you have visitors to San Antonio it's pretty sad we need to get them better thank you very much thank you very much Dick okay let's hear from table 4 hi my name is Bill and I'm representing table 4 okay we want to close the budget gap by cutting from center city development we need some development out here sidewalks streets drainage downtown operations we want to cut it 3 million dollars the money that they generate for hotel motel taxes stays down stays downtown so it's not lowering my tax rate it's not lowering your tax rate it stays downtown why don't we spend that money from sidewalks and whatever okay economic development that is a problem because nobody seems to know how much we really spend on it because CPS gives nice contracts for energy SAWS give nice contracts for water to get those businesses here nobody can tell me and I've asked the question before so we want to cut economic development 2 million dollars historic preservation I didn't vote for that planning department I didn't vote for that either 1 million dollars street cars there's nothing in this year's budget we think but we don't want to pay for street cars one time budget one time projects that is 7 million dollars for a one time project well sidewalks are a one time project so is drainage but we don't get 7 million dollars for that up here so we want to cut them 3 million dollars that's a total of 13 million dollars so we still got to cut some more executive bonuses they were saying let's go ahead and cut that 10% this year since there is going to be a budget gap that's a good place to start where's the other one we got here okay they would excuse me revenue type we did want to go I voted against that to raise property taxes and also to raise commercial property tax rates that I don't think you can split out but we want to go ahead and raise revenue so that would help we're going to raise 14 million dollars and we've cut 13 million dollars so we're down oh no no a lot less than that because we're raising 14 million dollars on property taxes okay people at our table want to raise cost of living increased price of gas has gone up so so the price of living has gone up 4.5% we don't have a figure so we came up with that human services there are a lot of poor people in San Antonio and there's a lot of poor people in District 10 we'd like to see at least 2% across there and also for the delegated agencies those are usually if I'm not mistaken tell me if I'm wrong aren't those like church working to fill gaps that are needed here District 10 has a lot of home bound seniors we would like to see 2% increase in dedicated agencies thank you very much thank you Bill thank you table 4 now table 5 okay my name is Jeanne Brady and Vanna White is here to help me show the charts you have to do your hand like that okay in number one the budget gap we propose programs for reduction that we would align uniform benefits with civilian employees to the tune of two million dollars center city development would be reduce one million streets we didn't really put a figure on that and what we wanted is for more care to be taken with streets so that we fix the street one week and then two months later you come back and you have to dig it up again so the next one is delegated agencies two million and we propose under revenue to be increased at least a one cent property tax increase and the second one is after school program fees and that might generate what we were hoping for would be to raise the cap on it a little bit so people could raise that money a little more that way under improvements service areas align uniform benefits with civilian employees so that means like each one would sort of balance out and so as you raise one or brought one down then that would work out that way is the way we saw it parks and under parks to do improvements we raise fees but we would like to see those fees go back to the parks so that would be that and for the library we would suggest no cuts at all we certainly would like to stay open more hours though by the way thank you very much let's hear it for table 5 okay table 6 hello everybody I'm Jackie and I'm representing table 6 we were at a very big disadvantage we did not have the fiscal year 2014 budget facts until the last maybe 60 seconds of our debate so we did the best we could with the information we had and okay so I would like to talk about actually we did talk about cuts we I thought was kind of ingenious if we're going to have to cut to cut all departments by 0.3% so everyone gets a small amount it wasn't my idea but I really liked it and revenue I think revenue is important we debated commercial property tax but we didn't come to a conclusion on that so we don't really have that to talk about but we also talked about fees for the park and of course I like the idea of it going back into the park and there's someone else at my table that likes that as well okay we wanted to add in some improvements no okay we wanted to add improvements with animal care services specifically with education that's very important to us and the proposed number was 25K and we figured we could get that from SAPD and SAFD which I really you know hate saying that but you know we have to take money from somewhere that we do get a lot and with their benefits so one other thing mentioned was infrastructure that didn't make the board infrastructure also needs some attention and was there anything else? I feel really bad because we really did not have this and it would have helped our discussion quite a bit and we would have had more points on our boards so for now that's what we have much table six okay table seven who's our spokesman for table seven okay Jim we're getting there so the very agreeable table number seven I wouldn't suggest total consensus but we were pretty close so we raised 25 million dollars and we did that by aligning uniform benefits with civilian employees we had a suggestion that we needed to cut a million dollars from the attorney's office and since nobody was going to defend attorneys there you go we went two million dollars from non departmental and one million dollars from one time projects and then we want to tax ourselves an additional eight million dollars on property tax and raise the residential alarm renewal fees for three million dollars so that's a total of 25 million we want to enhance animal care and pay for it with the EMS transport fee increase enhance human services especially senior citizen services one million dollars and pay for that of historic preservation and increase streets by three million and pay for that out of delegate agencies and district ten and district nine council members can figure out where that money comes from thank you thank you very much table seven table eight okay Roger you're on well since this is an exercise I'll try to explain this easily I can we've determined that you're right the lawyers are not going to be here arguing with us so yes we're going to cut a million dollars from the attorney's staff we're going to cut we're asking to cut two million from the municipal courts we're going to cut from the city center city development two million human services one million health department one million and delegate the agencies one million after school programs one million and downtown operation one million increase revenues by charging park fees I don't know if any of you have ever gone and cleaned some of the parks after some of the big events of the year and but they do make a mess sometimes and I think that we need to charge those people that set off an area of the park for the holiday season so no one else can use it there should be a fee for utilizing that space and denying other people access the library we need to create some way of offsetting some of the additional cost in the library because I understand that they're going to know books and we're going to be utilizing a lot of pads and I'm sure some of these pads are going to be lost and these pads there needs to be some way of regaining some of that revenue in the library so there should be a fee for this type of lost books and we need to collect this for the future there needs to be an increased cost or fee for EMS transport there's a lot of people abusing this and when they could easily drive themselves or have someone drive them to EMS now I know there's going to be some people disagree with this but there is a lot of need for generating revenue somewhere the planning department everybody may not agree with this but there's a lot of new developments and a lot of the infrastructure that the city is providing to get these services to that area there needs to be offset with some additional fees for the developers that are going further out in the community and making us put a bigger burden on the infrastructure for the inner city court enforcement we need to create an enforcement department that has some teeth when they write a citation we need to collect some fees because they have to follow that up and who around us doesn't have someone who has a home in the neighborhood it's either abandoned or not taking care of very well okay Roger need to wrap it up and then animal care I think that we can what needs to be done is when they take these animals in we should chip these animals and charge the people to come pick up their animals $500 for chipping them so that we don't get them lost anymore we know who they belong to we want more revenue for the police we want more police and we want to get that money from the department and residential alarm fees we need more policemen thank you thank you very much table eight okay table nine I'm Al Fulton with table nine here and we're focusing mainly on dealing with the revenue shortfall people have talked about aligning the benefits with civilian employees and we were told that it was about eight million to do that and we're suggesting an in between number of about four million to be achieved by negotiating there reductions in the executive and the administrative non-uniform and reduction in the non-departmental costs of three to four million we'd like to enhance revenue with property tax if one cent gets a seven million that's 25% of the problem solved right there so at least a one cent increase we were told that the total budget for fees is about 60 million that we take in a 20% increase across the board of fees will yield 12 million dollars there so there's 19 million increased revenue without without much pain I don't think and with some negotiating over here obviously we would have more to play with if we went up two cents on that the 14 million increase in the property tax but our first interest was in solving the revenue shortfall rather than getting extra in terms of improving services streets infrastructure is a big thing a city has to be safe and it has to have infrastructure so we're all in favor of the the streets the library functions are very important across the city and would like to improve those increase that and streets and traffic operations and the health department were areas in which we would increase the budgets without having put specific numbers on it but that's why people get paid the big box to put specific numbers on it thanks a lot way to go table and we work cheap table ten two more to go table ten good evening our group agreed to disagree and we didn't agree on anything we just had a lot of good opinions and a lot of dialogue we did agree for the most part that we wanted to have the police in line with everybody else we also decided that we didn't want any bonuses for anybody in the higher spots we agreed that we should check out and see if the city has any properties that are empty and we're having to pay the rent and we're having to pay the utilities that you know those either we need to lease out or rent out or try and get out of that contract with the legal department and we wanted to add a couple of fees for like animal care if you keep losing your animal if you don't spade your animal and again we had a very diverse group we wanted to have the city more green so we thought investing in solar as gradually because in the long run that would benefit the city this is this has nothing to do with the city budget but our group just wanted everybody to know we don't want street cars we couldn't agree on CODA we talked about it and we do want city improvements I think the whole city has areas whether it's holes in the streets or sidewalks that are cracked or whatever this when we were so far apart on this delegate agencies that we had to put it in the middle we didn't put it on the right or the left it's in the center so it just depends on how you felt about it and the libraries the county is spending $1.3 million on one library that it's just e-books our libraries all have physical books and I heard him say we weren't gonna we were only going to do e-books and now we still carry books and we have space for people to meet so everybody felt like that's a good investment in our education anything for education is good for the city very good let's give him a hand okay one we've all been waiting for table 11 okay good evening I'm Ray Knox district 9 and one thing about the budget need to know that all the agencies all the departments I think are already required to look at a 10% cut across the board so in looking at that it's really hard to try to find something on top of that after the last several years there's been 10% cut each year so we didn't focus as much on what to get rid of because it's kind of hard to trim leaning off fat but we did come up with some things one of them of course has been mentioned many times tonight is the economic development I think there's a you know that to say we didn't put dollar amounts because we just kind of be pulling that out of somewhere and not where it would really be coming up and so we kind of left that part along to the people to know more about those but the economic development you know there's development incentives for downtown east side west side south side we didn't see it north side but it's one of those things that need to be revisited see if those amounts have been really benefiting over the last several years make sure that it is efficient and that it is helping bring businesses in and in is productive so that's one area to look at also we do hope that when the benefits with the uniform is brought up that good negotiations will help make that more equitable across the board as well and of course that was one that definitely could bring in cut from the budget but also the uniformed I know when some of the dependents not part of this collective bargaining agreement but for dependents it isn't required to properly list who all is dependent to make sure it's efficient and who's being covered or not so that needs to be looked at also in human services that's one thing that we can see that there needs to be additions could be some subtractions would like for the whole thing to be revisited so that it's efficient for the quality that you're getting back for your money one name that popped up that I've seen every year that pops up and amongst our discussion was the project quest you know is that something that's being you know efficiently used and productive for the total amount that it's at now bringing in revenue we've also talked about the property tax in our group we had a vote it was actually the same but we did have quite a bit of discussion on that one thing reason why they wanted to keep it the same they're worried about if you add tax here it might open the door for many other taxes fees and other things though some of us might have thought different but that was the democratic process in ours now also permit fees there are some that permit fees for all different all the departments that have permits across the board need to be revisited some of them have gone up the last few years have to make sure it's not a burden on what is being done and that continue to have the amount of permits we have but that's something to be revisited one thing I'll mention about permit fees for instance like the parks there may be fees that can go up but it's known that these permit fees go to the general fund they're not dedicated to any particular agency so keep that in mind as well when you're looking at that also code enforcement that's been talked about we agree with that also it wouldn't hurt to increase maybe a fire alarm fees just a little bit I think we've been through this let me see this last one here the additional size improvements human services there too adult education been cut quite a bit here recently and I think we think that is very much important and some price is more important than pre-k which isn't part of this of course but funding adult services is but also the parks and the libraries need to not only be kept up but not cut but kept up and one thing maintenance on parks is extremely important we've increased the amount of land in parks and having a hard time keeping that infrastructure up so that's it thank you so much for all of us tonight let's give a hand to table 11 ladies and gentlemen I want to thank you for this time I think this has been absolutely great these are the kind of things we need to hear city staff thank you for showing up tonight we really do appreciate it we're glad that we've got a voice in this process they've taken very good notes on what you've had to say and I assure you that this is the sort of thing we'll be fighting about when we finally come up with this final announcement Crier thank you for coming out from District 9 and to those of you from whatever district go Spurs go