City Council Budget Workshop 8-17-21

[0:00:00] and this meeting is a budget review meeting and we will start with public comment issues or concerns not on the regular agenda may be raised by the public at this time citizens should speak from the podium address all comments of the to the dias and begin by stating their name and address or single member district number and limit their remarks to less than three minutes do we have anyone in the audience at this point who would like to offer public comment i would like to offer a few public comments i did prepare some thoughts last night and for whatever reasons they are not on my phone this morning so i'm going to speak from my heart and from my head and offer comments today quality of life in this city very often is delivered because of the quality of employees that we have in the city of san angelo we cannot continue to promote ourselves as a great quality of life city if in fact we don't have the ability to deliver the services that the citizens desire want and expect from the city of san angelo or city hall i do not believe at the last meeting that i as mayor made a strong enough statement about what i believe in terms of the employees of the city of san angelo i truly believe that they are one of the greatest assets that we have as i also believe that our great assets are the citizens of san angelo who continue to live here pay their taxes here pay their fees here and spend their money in the city of san angelo so that we can have the revenue that we need to continue to function and promote ourselves as a city of great quality i also say the following that as we have been challenged at least from the day

[0:02:02] that i became mayor with tremendous challenges i would say from the citizens of san angelo that we had not invested enough into our infrastructure that we continue to have dramatic problems as it relates to infrastructure and certainly february this year the cry was very loud about we needed to invest in our infrastructure but when we say that we must also say the following that in order to invest in our infrastructure we must also invest and to invest in our employees our employees should take great pride and be proud that they are a part of the city of san angelo and work hard for the citizens money is always an issue and everyone will have varying opinions in terms of how the money should be spent or how we put together a budget but at the end of the day what we hope to do is to develop a plan that tells our employees we take pride in them being a part of the city of san angelo and that the citizens understand what the citizens understand that we understand what the expectations are in terms of making sure the infrastructure investment has has been done they have spent a lot of years watching the city of san angelo talk about monies and funds and make excuses for infrastructure situation we can't ignore infrastructure and we cannot ignore employees and so our challenge as we continue to move forward on this budget conversation is how do we ensure that both are taken care of and that the end of the day we continue to be a city of great quality and that the citizens like being called a citizen of the city of san angelo and feel like that we have not let them down in terms of our responsibility to them with that let's dive into our workshop

[0:04:08] itinerary so 3a is a discussion of matters regarding the fiscal year 2021 2022 budget preparation including but not limited to one general fund revenue and expenditures and two other items needing council direction and tina euron again you'll recall that on thursday we started out our general fund budget workshop council decided to take a little pause on that and send staff with some direction to come up with some more proposals for salaries and so we're back with you today to talk a little bit more about that our first proposal here option a or let me remind you let's see that we are seeking council direction and that the budget and property tax levy ordinances will be introduced on september 9th and adopted on september 21st so this is the last regular council meeting before we need to begin to adopt those proposals and moving on to our first option option a you'll recall that marginal revenue was just over 1.9 million dollars and we were originally looking at a sales tax at a five percent decrease from fy21 so this is one of the original proposals that you did see already with this we are looking at the ability to provide a four and a half percent raise across the board with the city funding 50 percent of the increase to the health insurance option b again chose marble i should have clarified that first option in this option leave the property tax as is so i just want to point that out and then option b the marginal revenue of course still at 1.9 million dollars looking at a sales tax decrease at four percent rather than the five percent uh this would allow us to give salary raises of five percent across the board and still be able to have the city pay for 50 of the increase to health insurance option c

[0:06:10] marginal revenue still at 1.9 this one is looking at decreasing the property tax by point zero zero one um so at the .775 level still looking at sales tax at the five percent decrease and this would allow for four and a half percent raises across the board with uh the 50 percent health insurance covered by the city option d again with the 0.775 so decrease of 0.001 sales tax at 4 percent that allows us to do 5 raises across the board with 50 picked up by the city for health insurance option e marginal revenue 1.9 this one lowers the property tax rate to 0.770 so a decrease of 0.006 and this first option e has the sales tax at a 5 decrease that allows enough funding for 3.75 raises and finally option f again with the same marginal revenue 0.770 on the property tax rate with the sales tax at a four percent decrease that allows raises of four four and a quarter percent across the board as well as the fifty percent of the insurance increase so those are the six options that we as staff and management work through to propose to you give you some starting point for a discussion and allow you to give us direction for how you want us to bring back your budget on september 9th i want to start by asking brian to come forward and talk about the loyalty pay because all of these slides exclude a loyalty pay and so i think the first thing i want to understand is describe the loyalty pay what that number would look like based off of i'm sure some notes that you have in terms of what loyalty pay for civilians would amount to i don't have the exact cost with me do you want to talk about how it impacts employees or do you want

[0:08:13] the total cost because i think i can work with kim to get that really quick to you but well i first of all describe what it means i mean we have loyalty pay in for our police and fires so we know from that that there is a reason for that loyalty pay to exist and i would assume that we could use some of the parameters that they have in place as a starting point for conversation on loyalty pay yeah so you know one of the big drivers on this is is one of the successes that we've seen in both pd and fire after the loyalty pay was implemented is their retention has grown a little bit and so what we see in fire is the average person in the fire department has a retention or a length of service of 13.25 years the average pd of the officer npd is 11.34 the average non-civil service employee we have is 6.57 and we need to be able to build our bin strength that actually it's a conservative measure because it allows us to promote from within which is always cheap cheaper than recruiting from without so we really need to be able to do that to increase that 6.57 years so that's the reason i kind of put forward before you the idea of adding you know making loyalty pay available to all city employees um so the way that it works is it's 25 per year of service and they'll receive that payment per month so on your first your first anniversary you'll get 25 dollars per month loyalty pay and and it kind of increases from there and the whole goal is to get people long-term again so that we can save by promoting from within from building our

[0:10:15] infrastructure from within rather than recruiting from without does that help yes it does and so i'm assuming and of course when you say that the average length of time for civilian employees is six plus some months my assumption is that in certain areas of the city that that is a lower number that the turnover rate would be higher for example perhaps in some of shane carlton's areas of responsibility versus other areas the middle actually oddly enough from and this is anecdotal again i don't have the exact numbers but it seems like the middle of our grades have a longer retention period than the top and the bottom of our crates which does account for a significant amount of turnover uh through quantity at the bottom end and and the the cost at the top end uh so there's a lot of cost in that turnover from both of those sides so again if if this could help stabilize that over time it could be a real benefit to the city from a conservative fiscal conservative perspective did you put any numbers together well because you introduced the loyalty pace i'm assuming you had to have some numbers in play that you were looking at as it related to what that would be it would be roughly the cost of about two and a half percent um of the raise so if if it was what's in front of you here is four and a quarter um if we implemented loyalty pay it's gonna be roughly uh two and a half percent of that uh i believe so i think that would allow only the remainder of the uh uh one and three quarters percent okay so um the other issue i have

[0:12:20] here's here's what my thoughts are and then i want to hear from council members in terms of what they think i believe strongly in the loyalty pay and i think that there's proven history that the police and fire have said that's a program that works and i believe that based off of what is going on today in the workforce that we need to establish a loyalty pay for the balance of our employees the question one of the first questions one would have is the following so if you started loyalty pay today does day does this year count as year one or do we backtrack and start picking that up from the day that someone was employed so if i've been here for five years already and we established a loyalty pay do we go back and calculate the first five years and put that in that bucket or do we start from year five because i've been here i'm on my fifth year and we go from five to twenty yes ma'am that's a good question and and that actually does is the reason why my number represents such you know two and a half percent if you started it in in october then it would the cost would be almost nothing if you didn't go back and look at people's terms of service with the or lengths of service with the with the city so and when we implemented that with pd and fire we did implement it retroactively to the time that they have and that time is valuable again i spoke i spoke last meeting about the opportunity to get veronica back in human resources with her 12 years of history and how valuable that is it's just every department will tell you that having people that have been here for any length of service really does help that institutional knowledge is almost invaluable

[0:14:22] how long have police and fire had the loyalty pay many years is before i got here um so it's been here for a while lucy you had a question yes brian i just wanted to ask you on the as far as if we would go back five years on the employees do you have a number of how much it would be how much it would cost it's roughly if we go back and we take everybody's length of current length of service into account it's going to be roughly two and a half percent of whatever raise and and obviously whatever raise that you approve would have to buy down that percentage from there uh to to enact the loyalty pay but i do believe strongly in it but we have no numbers because i think that's that's what i was asking is the dollar amount so we're asking so if you see um if you see the civilian pay at two and a half or at five percent this is actually a really good slide to help um it's 10 43 592. roughly half of that is going to be the cost of loyalty pay now one of the options that we have that i think could is a legitimate thing mayor that you know you had mentioned to me before is uh related to a cap and i think because it's a new program that that's not a problem to add a cap of 20 because we really want to get people to 20 years to where they can retire with the city so if we want to cap that out at 20 years i think that's that's definitely doable and that'll buy down the cost a little bit as well what year does an employee become vested five years five years for for a non-civil service employee with tmrs i'm going to throw out some numbers just so we can start a conversation amongst council and so we can talk about it what i would like to see

[0:16:26] as a starting point for the conversation is the property tax at .770 that the property tax dollars that would reduce would come from excess tax revenue and not from and not be detrimental to this conversation so i strongly believe in reducing the property tax to 0.770 when i take a look at what other cities have done around us many of our cities comparable cities have all offered property tax reductions i think it's time we did even in abilene they reduced theirs in a small manner in other words it was only 169 000 difference between versus our 324. it was introduced by a city council member the mayor and the city manager made the following comment it's a very small start but it's headed in the right direction and we need to do for the citizens something as well and that starts the conversation so i'm a big believer in reducing that .77 six to a .770 but i believe strongly in not allowing that to impact at this point the dollars that we want to look at here in terms of raises i believe strongly in the five percent for police i believe strongly in the five percent for fire i believe strongly in leaving the sales tax at the 5 decline and i say that for the fine reasons we don't always know we do plan conservatively because we don't always know the things that are going to hit us and so far we've always had the ability to fund those things because we've had access tax revenue this year two things have already come up one was the opportunity to buy

[0:18:29] the standard times building and so we had the funds because of additional tax revenue to be able to buy that building for nine hundred thousand dollars in addition to that we were totally caught off guard with the additional funds that were going to be that we had to pay for the electricity during the storm and so that was 400 some thousand so had have we not had that money in additional revenue we would have had to seek sources for that revenue so i believe strongly in leaving that sales tax at the five percent decline i believe strongly in leaving the police raise at five percent i believe strongly in the fire being at five percent what i would like to see and this is open for conversation is a civilian at i believe the 3.25 percent and adapting the loyal pay which would be the 1.75 percent which would in essence be a total of 5 percent but i say that and i don't know if those statistics add up correctly when i say that but i think one of the big steps forward is that we want to make sure that our employees feel that their loyalty to their job to the citizens to the city of san angelo is valued that they are valued and the longer that they are with us they will see a benefit from that yes ma'am and again if if the cap is the cap of 20 years is something that you want to do that will buy down my original number as well and so uh i think what would be good direction is if you want to set it at you know whatever that dollar amount is for five percent for us work within that to to do the things that are necessary to implement loyalty pay and then whatever left would be the percentage because people individuals employees get vested at five years i think it's a good standard to have this loyalty pay go to the 20-year anniversary because they're already vested there's a reason to stay employed by the city because you are vested

[0:20:32] but i want to make sure that we protect those employees who have given time energy and add value to us because of their longevity i would support the health insurance of 50 i think it's the last year we can do that because i think we're going to see increases and so i'm putting that out there as my perspective in terms of what we need to do and i'm certainly going to open it up for conversations from other council members to add to that conversation and i have harry who has his finger up for comment well i'll go back to saying what i said probably the last thursday when you got guaranteed income from property tax to 324 000 plus dollars and you're replacing it with anticipated revenues from sales tax i wonder what happens if you don't make that sales tax goal i mean what do we do at that point in time do we reduce salaries do we reduce benefits do we reduce what citizens are getting from services i i just asked that question answer those questions for you number one we never reduce services number two we never take salary pay away from people what we do choose to do is if people resign and the position is open we don't re-hire that position unless it's a critical position when we approve this budget those salaries are approved we would never ever attempt as far as i know to reduce one's salary but what i do say is we constantly talk about at the city council during budget session things like fee increases things like proposed future programs that would require a fee increase we have to be considerate of the citizens of this city at the same point in time we must make sure that we have the best of employees

[0:22:36] that we can hire and that want to stick with the city but we can't ignore the citizens and i think we have the opportunity here and that's one of the reasons we plan conservatively if we don't make the sales tax numbers we've got some funds available and we have we don't know what is going to happen this year we know last year our sales tax performance was over and above what we projected but primarily because of federal stimulus money stimulated our economy we have stories to tell about one person who was on commission that because of federal stimulus money made a huge big whopping commission check there that is not the traditional economy that we're in it was an inflated economy with dollars from the federal government in the amounts of millions of dollars it helped us in the long run because obviously we have had a need for some of those funds for electricity and for um a building purchase i don't know if i said it earlier in my speech but i i call out february as a great example and i the heroic efforts of shane kelton and allison strooby and the people who work in those areas and it does not mean other people in the city hall did not work hard not diminishing their contribution but those folks spent some miserable hours trying to take care of the citizens of san angelo and one of the reasons why i'm very determined to do as i presented is that some of those individuals that were in that cold water and 12 12 below zero temperatures were some of the people that perhaps on the pay scale or at the lower end of the pay scale those conditions were miserable and what i think we want to do is when you look at for example a five percent

[0:24:40] raise across the board what you do is that people on the higher end of the pay scale benefit more than the people on the lower end of the pay scale and i think as we're discussing this and making decisions what we want to be able to do is to make sure that the people on the lower end of the pay scale feel a benefit and the loyalty pay is that benefit that will add more greatly to their life yes ma'am that's that's part of the reason that that i put that forward as well is it disproportionately will affect the lower end because if you're going from a percentage it does exactly what you say but if you kind of fix it to a dollar amount then it'll disproportionately affect the lower end which was kind of the goal in doing that and and i'll speak real quick if i can correct the record just briefly um the institutional knowledge that i have here is already paying off because she heard me misspoken so now i can correct the record police actually had loyalty loyalty pay added three years ago i was thinking that but right before i became uh director of human resources so um they've had steps but they haven't had loyalty they didn't have loyalty uh it was fire that's had it since before i got here so i just wanted to correct that record and when we did implement that with police it was retroactive to the beginning so if you have any other questions for me right now well let me see i don't know if if harry do you have another question just probably a clarification i want citizens to know and the staff to know that i certainly support this loyalty pay you've said you've heard me say this many times even before the mayor was mayor i've sat at this particular position or out in the hallway and i said we can got to take care of all of the employees in the city not just the firemen and the police department who we support wholeheartedly

[0:26:43] and rightfully so but the people in the ditch the people that are making sure that our water is quality is good enough to drink all of those individuals we need to make sure that we're taking care of them and and so i just want to make sure that that gets out there again lucy you had your hand up i just wanted to say that i am totally on board with the with the mayor and councilman thomas um i also am very much for the loyalty pay i definitely want to see the employers on the lower scale benefit from this and not only this year but the following years these people are the people that are actually out there in the cold yes we do have and i appreciate everyone from the city every employee everybody has a part that we all come together but we also have those people that work a little bit harder and they have a job that's a little bit harder so for me i would want to see that loyalty pay be implemented in this budget see i think the other benefit from the loyalty pay is let's say the economy becomes a really tough economy for all kinds of reasons so our ability to continue to perhaps have the same kind of raises that we're talking about today for example it doesn't ever change the loyalty pay that's right the loyalty pay is the solid you're going to get it regardless of what the economy is and regardless of what we are able to do from another perspective the loyalty pay is there you don't mess with it it's a policy it's a program and you stick with it and there's security in that in knowing that that is going to continue with you and for dollar for dollar

[0:28:46] i would say that that is going to impact morale more than any other way to spend that money is to say your time here matters um is is just it's it's a you know it's a good thing to know that if i'm here for another year i'm worth more to the city every year yeah okay so um do i have any other comments mayor yes my preference um of the of the six options that we have been presented is option b um i like harry um am okay with leaving the property tax rate at the 776 but and and i fully support loyalty pay for the non-civil service folks i like the five percent but also i want to throw this in there we talked about it briefly thursday we're talking about the difference between us picking up the other half of the health insurance of being 18 thousand dollars let's pick up the eighteen thousand dollars i don't care what option yeah i do care what option we do but let's pick up the eighteen thousand dollars um and again i am i am in favor of option b i would also add um that in my opinion we need to task the staff with dealing with the loyalty pay issue i don't think in my opinion council doesn't need to get into the to the minutia of of divvying that up let's let staff figure that out we got the professionals that can do that but again my my preference is option b in addition to option b i would like to see us pick up the other half of the health insurance at 18 000. the reasons i mean two things i say to that first of all at the last meeting we talked about well when you do this analysis that you did in terms of what

[0:30:49] other cities do or don't do one of the things you could not answer was but what about the health insurance that we have picked up over a matter of time past four years we've picked up 100 percent of that increase but we're not getting credit for it because there's not we call ourselves self-insured so we don't get credit for it in terms of an analysis of what that does in terms of helping the employee out the other issue with that is the following that in comments that have been made it was that many people don't consider the health insurance or the pension um a bonus necessarily and perhaps they don't because they don't intend to hang around or perhaps because they have a wife or a husband who works for another company and they have one policy and they're both under that same policy at another company so not all employees use our health insurance so when you choose to make a decision about that insurance it doesn't impact all employees unlike if you do the loyalty pay and you do the raise you are impacting all employees at the same rate now i have a question yes lucy playing trains have a number on that brian as far as how many are on insurance and how many are not i don't have the exact percentage but it's right over 95 percent of people it's a small percentage it's a very small percentage that's that's either on insurance or the spouse job or maybe their retired military or something like that and they have a different option but the vast vast majority of our folks are on our insurance so the question i have today is um number one do we wait until we have what this picture looks like based off of tommy's b and mine that's not up there i think we need to see those numbers

[0:32:54] but we can take a vote if we need to take a vote and ask which plan which option city council would choose to move forward with maybe first before you do that um first of all thank you for even uh really considering the the the top and dollar the top percentage was five percent um i really do feel that absolutely needs to be fair across the board police fire and civilians five percent uh definitely we can work with this part especially the civilian part of it within that five percent to really establish a good program uh for um the loyalty program itself but i do i do support what uh tommy just said a while ago eighteen thousand dollars to cover that portion of it on the health insurance quite frankly i know brian did a study to see what other cities were applying toward uh their health insurance and they're paying a lot more i think that eighteen thousand probably the last year that we'll be able to do in eighteen thousand because following years it's going to be much higher than that so you just stole my thunder a little bit i was coming up to say that this might be the last year that we can really pick up the full amount uh we have done everything y'all heard me say this for the last three years we've done everything creative that we can do to lower those costs and to try to you know when i took the job uh one of the considerations is the retiree portion that that liability associated with that at that time i believed it was going to grow for the next 10 years and we've seen it grow significantly for the first three years i've been here and i'd still anticipate that to grow before we start leveling off in about seven more years so we have to manage that along with everything else and we've done everything we can to control costs that we can think of without changing the plan without actually reducing the benefit which you know uh depending on the future of health care which it's it's pretty volatile right now uh from from even month to month the way we see claims coming in

[0:34:56] so it's really hard to gauge what the future is but we know it's going to increase and it could increase a lot and so this might be the last year that the city has the opportunity to pick up the full amount for only 18 000. i have no problem adding that to my program that i presented and then what i would say is based off of redoing those numbers you would look to see how much of that property tax reduction would come from excess sales tax versus the calculation here but i believe strongly that that property tax reduction needs to happen i think the citizens deserve that i'd like to leave the sales tax at five percent i'd like police raise it five percent i like the fire rates at five percent i like civilian at five percent inclusive of the loyalty pay and then the include in that the health insurance being picked up that's my proposal mayor just quickly um kimberly's done some quick math while we've been sitting here we she brought up this spreadsheet and the cost to implement your plan as you're saying with five percent across the board would be just under half a million dollars about 490 000 that's very rough estimate but that's what it's looking about what it would take to implement this plan inclusive of the loyalty plan it would be part of the part of the five percent included for non-civil service so yes okay so say that again so with the mayor's proposal here at the 1.9 in marginal revenue the property tax rate at 0.770 sales tax at a 5 decline 5 across the board's salaries with the civilian portion of five percent being divvied out between loyalty pay and raises and then 100 of the insurance being picked up by cosa we'd be at about right right under 500 thousand again rough estimate so about half a million half a million what

[0:36:59] from the sales tax sales tax surplus that would be required to pick up the rest of the cost okay well i'm confused because the sales tax is 324 000 at 770. so how did it go to 324 000 to 500. that that's actually the property tax line and that would be the amount of decrease to revenue if we took it from 776 to seven seven zero i know so that's 324 000. yes ma'am that would be the decrease of the property tax rate versus the sales tax surplus that we would need to pick up the rest of the cost of implementing loyalty pay and the five percent you would decrease the percentage decline of sales tax to pick up is that what i think what i heard the mayor proposed was using current year surplus to make it the difference but again because we don't have a pure number because these numbers aren't the numbers right and so we need to see this spreadsheet that reflects the property tax at point seven seven zero which is the three hundred twenty four thousand three hundred twenty six dollars the sales tax planned at the five percent decline the police raise at five percent the fire at five percent the civilian five percent which is inclusive of a raise and the loyalty pay program and then a hundred percent of the insurance and the question mark is after implementing that where we currently the marginal revenue of a million nine probably isn't a million nine because it was a million nine before before we had the property tax reduction yes ma'am that's where we would be short approximately half a million dollars and that's how much it would take to make up the difference between the actual cost mayor yes um if i'm looking at this particular slide and looking at the property tax rate proposed property tax rate at seven seven zero we're reducing that amount of revenue by three hundred and twenty four thousand dollars if you take a look at sales tax at a five percent decline from where we are today that's two only 259 334

[0:39:03] dollars that those two figures come to be a deficit of about uh seventy five thousand sixty five thousand dollars so that money has to come out of the marginal revenue in order for that to make we haven't even talked about the the loyalty pay or the five percent in those other three or the yeah that's all figured in there so you've got an additional uh 490 000 on top of that 65 so now you get 555 000 that comes off that 1.912 marginal revenue well i think where the confusing part is my assumption is is that when we take a a look for example at the police at five percent and that dollar amount the dollar amount over and above that amount for loyalty pay or steps is where five percent would be 562 for five percent versus 421 for three and a three i'm not interested in the 375. i want to go back to the five percent and so if you go back to the five percent police race which would be 562 115 and the quit all we're looking at is the the line that says salaries police 5 562 115. and the question mark is the following the question is does that number include the loyalty pay in the steps or is that dollar amount regardless of whether it's fire police it doesn't matter where are those dollars is the question that's what was asked is that inclusive in that or is that in addition to that buyer and police already include loyalty pay yes for civilian pay if you asked us to come back with five percent across the board it would be also inclusive of the loyalty pay correct and what the difference on this slide which should be relatively easy to figure is that 1 million 43 592 is inclusive of the raise

[0:41:10] the 1 million 43 592 the civilian would be the total dollar amount we would invest in loyalty pay plus raises yes ma'am that's correct that's the point so then the marginal revenue that's established there the one million nine one two five hundred is a number i'm assuming became the marginal revenue when it was first calculated at node property tax decline is that correct that's correct so if you go back to what the marginal revenue is if you do what we're saying then what is that real new marginal revenue that we're looking at correct if you yes yes so that would be that's the number we need can you erase the red please yeah yeah all right i'm with the mayor i think we show the five percent and we just can you go back to items a or b options a or b yes what we need to do i think is what i'm hearing is we need to compute the value of a property tax rate decrease and the value of an alternate sales tax no we want to leave the sales tax at the 5 decline what we want to look at is is that what's that marginal revenue if you decrease it to 0.770 my assumption is that marginal revenue is the calculation based off of having a 0.776 property tax rate and it goes down that marginal revenue goes down when you reduce the property tax rate so the difference my assumption i'm not saying i'm right i'm just saying that's the way i'm looking you are you're exactly correct mayor so it would the difference would be the 1 million 912 minus the 324 326. that would be our new marginal revenue yes and so what is that's the number i want us to look at can you do that yes over here

[0:43:13] um tom sent me a text he wanted me to read he says i am in agreement with the 555 the the five percent raise at a point when we can't budget enough funds for infrastructure i do not see a .770 proposed property tax as it reduces needed money for streets if we need a symbolic step i see a .775 but not in favor of a large reduction if we stay at 776 or 775 we can manage the health insurance well here's what i say is i'm strong believer in reducing the property tax rate to 0.770 every time we have a budget meeting in a budget conversation we talk about increasing fees consistently and that means that the public has to come up with more money out of their pocket to pay for the services rendered including infrastructure at some point you've tapped out the citizens you've tapped them out we have to give a break and i'm a big believer the citizens deserve a break as i am a strong proponent of giving the five percent police raise the five percent fire rate the five percent civilian including the loyalty pay and picking up the health insurance that in my mind addresses citizens and it addresses the needs of our employees and the support of our employees both from an increase in pay and and making sure that that increase in pay does not have to pick up their health insurance costs this year aaron at this point really on our end the five percent across the board picking up the insurance we can make everything else work we can work

[0:45:16] diligently to make that happen but on that on my part i just want to make sure that we're doing what's fair to for our staff and i do like what i'm hearing at this point on that end of it and of course especially picking up the health insurance as well everything else we can work through and i know that we have a very uh wonderful finance staff that we can work out all those other details but really for me primarily our our objective right now is to address address a staff as far as a pay that's that's fallen behind we want to make sure that we get it out there so we do appreciate the support lucy come here we're talking about the increase on the health insurance to go to 100 correct well what we i think we said i think there was that eighteen thousand dollars that tommy was talking about whatever that was would be added back in whatever that number was that's it tommy what was it it's 85 000.85 versus 67. here mayor if i could yes i think you're very close so there's just a couple of remaining issues could i get you to put slide a or option a or b up please um could we go to option a please okay this no that's not a good one option b i'm sorry no no it doesn't work that's the five percent across the board uh there's an eighteen thousand dollar change which is has low consequences relative to the large numbers elsewhere for health insurance which leaves this one approximately forty eight thousand dollars revenue over budget and so we really only need to settle the top of the page in blue what property tax uh change impact there are two options right now that y'all are talking about leave it as is or go to 770 we know that that has approximately a

[0:47:18] 324 000 maybe make the math easy 325 impact and the sales tax assumption four percent decline or five percent decline five percent that's what we've said if we if we do that that changes those numbers by approximately and thirty eight thousand and so instead of remember we talked about approximately forty eight thousand at the bottom of this slide because we because of the uh discussed change to health insurance instead of that being 48 000 to the good with those changes and no other change that number changes to 5 by 538 downward and so that very much confirms the earlier number we heard that we need that 490 to to make things balance so we're saying we're 490 000 short which would mean then that conversation that 490 000 would come from the 2021 excess tells re sales tax revenue is that correct yes ma'am if that's your direction that's where i'm at and i'm just one vote one opinion so i'll be glad to go down the line of uh lane you look like you're gonna offer something did you say that your number on the civilian five percent with a cap would change that million 43 592. he said it might be a little lower because you capped it 20 years well i don't know if that's inclusive so i don't no matter what the cost to implement loyalty pay it would come out of that five percent so that that number would not grow would not lessen that number is a solid number basically whatever's left after we implement the loyalty pay we would max out towards raises so that number would remain the same and we can i say this i'm a big believer

[0:49:21] that the 0.770 is the correct number on property tax revenue there could be um i just believe in that i i believe the citizens deserve that it's my opinion okay larry do you have any comment you'd like to add i think we're in basically common agreement on the five percent police raise fire uh civilian five percent with the loyalty paid built in i think we want to pay for the health insurance at 100 rate it's the bottom line that's the only problem we've got right now correct lucy oh i'm i'm in agreement with what i just recently said was the fight across the board okay tommy and or harry i'm still on option b mayor um i i'm kind of where tommy is i want i'd like to keep the property tax rate at that 776. i mean i'm i'm very old school when you've got burden in the hand and you're looking at someplace else in the bush i'd like to see that 325 000 there because then that you're not at a deficit from that marginal revenue when you're trying to implement the rest of that stuff just don't ask the test the sales the property tax payers to pay for anything else because that's what you're asking and that's what i'm concerned about but what i see happening is we've got four people who are in vote in support of the plan i just presented two plus tommy is three so right now we've got four to three to move forward on this isn't a final vote to move forward and present on the september 9th the proper tax rate at .770 the sales tax at five percent the police raise at five percent of five percent the civilian at five percent inclusive of the loyalty pay and then a inclusive of picking up the health insurance costs that's what i see as a 4-3 vote at this point mayor yes please i brought tom i counted him in as one of your votes tom do you want to say anything

[0:51:24] no but i'm going to echo what i have to meet my computer here and i apologize we can't get through here i'm going to echo what harry says but i'm strongly in favor of brenda i mean we've our constituents tax base is tax tabling taxed hard we've done all we can to try to keep that mitigated as best we can for the past 10 years i see if we wanted to go to a .75 or 0.74 but i hate giving up the 324 when we've got a hand on it but i be i see both sides of it i'm in favor i'm extremely excited about what everybody's done here today in fact i'm really impressed we got to this as quickly as we did i just i'd like to see some options and when we have that 320 sports it's hard to give that one up because i know other people will pick that up i mean we're not going to see a reduction in our taxes on our tax bill because of the county and the school board i just think people remember what they pay not what they rate and that's why i'd like to stay at the 776 but i'm up for a little discussion on that too and i just say the fine then we cannot ask the taxpayer for another fee to be added to their agenda to have to pay we either live with trying to work with the property taxpayers i mean i'm just we we got citizens who feel very strong one other thing one other thing that i've heard from a very few constituents very few when they ask about the reduction from 776 to 770 we've got to remember that on our 200 000 appraised value house that's only 12 and so even though we're we're headed down that particular path the amount of money is not significant and the one or two individuals that i had that discussion with said they would rather keep the money in the budget to pay for raises and whatever else we needed to do so i just offer that uh

[0:53:28] twelve dollars on a two hundred thousand dollar house uh moving from seven seven six to seven seven zero i mean that's where it's don't ask the customer don't ask the citizens for more for anything else then because you can't keep taking you can't there's an end to it and i look at it and i say we've been able to address the raises here and i say the fine just as lubbock waco abilene all reduce their property tax rates we don't want to be known once again as the second as the only second city in the state of texas with the tax rate that we have that is not a promotion we need okay move forward yes but we still have a bottom line of 490 000 what we said earlier was there would be consideration for that coming out of the excess sales tax revenue from the 2021 budget and that's where we would look at those dollars and the question mark is the following is and i guess what we it we can do is number one talk about that and get support for taking that out of the excess property tax which we don't have to do today we can do on september the ninth when we finalize the property tax rate um so we can either take a vote just a second we can either take a vote on that right now in terms of where we want it to go or we can wait when we make a final presentation on september the 9th go ahead tommy brenda i'm okay with being on the wrong side of a 4-3 vote in terms of what i prefer um that this that's the way this process works and that's if we got four people that say agree with you to me that's the way the process works let's go ahead and settle this today so that staff can get to work on all this if we need to take 490 000 out of sales tax to accomplish what the what the

[0:55:33] majority four want then that's what we do that still doesn't change my preference but i understand how this process works so my preference in terms of moving forward would be to have the whatever is necessary sounds like it's right at 500 000 to come out of the excess sales uh sales tax revenue and y'all then go to work and then when you present the final to us it would be at the 770 if that's if the four want that um and uh the five percent uh reduction uh from uh current uh current sales tax uh and then picking up the 18 additional 18 000 for for health insurance but i'm again that's not what i agree with but that's what we'll go with okay marching forward okay so i'm just going to clarify we're bringing back the budget ordinance with that direction that included in the new salary budget lines yes thank you all for all the work you did brian veronica kimberly tina um everybody that i know that more than y'all had a piece of this but thank you for your diligence and all your work thank you tommy once again thank you to all the employees of the city of san angelo who have continued to work hard to deliver all the quality work that you have the services you provide and the tough climate that many of you have had to work in so thank you very much for that and with that we will conclude this meeting mayor it looks like we've got um some folks that want to make public sure absolutely good morning council and mayor my name is jeremy kennedy and i live in single

[0:57:34] member district six and i'm the co-president of this angel police officers coalition i spoke to you on thursday of last week and it was a much different speech that i thought i was going to get up here this morning and talk about after listening to some of the changes that have been decided on i'd like to present one other option that you all would have by forecasting a flat tax revenue and these are the numbers consolidated by myself through the police department and then also the budget options total marginal revenue would be three point two one eight million dollars a possible fire raise of six and a half percent would be eight hundred and forty thousand eight hundred forty dollars uh police get police pay scale flattening to get the officers at the same uh percentage level of their benchmark peers would be seven hundred and five thousand two hundred and sixty nine dollars uh a police a police department pay raise of three percent would be four hundred and two zero zero four dollars or four hundred and two thousand four dollars loyalty pay for all city employees and this came from last thursday's slides three hundred ninety eight thousand and forty three dollars a civilian pay raise of three and a half percent at seven hundred and sixty thousand nine hundred and fifty three dollars and the health insurance increase covering all of it would be eighty five thousand nine hundred and eighty four dollars with leftover revenue of twenty four thousand nine hundred and thirty four dollars i understand better what what you're trying to do as far as forecasting more conservatively i understand that i only ask that based on based on the numbers and the structural issues uh the difference between the scales the the proposal that i've laid out and what i've heard today that we watch those very closely because one of the strongest things and

[0:59:36] it doesn't affect me personally but it affects all the officers of the police department is that hopefully the the sales tax is much higher like this year much higher than it was forecast and that we look at april possibly [Music] doing that pay scale flattening for the police department and and putting the differences in those pay raises from what's being proposed uh today that i like and what's missing based on conservative forecast revenues thank you thank you further public comment okay with none then may i ask for a motion for adjournment so moved by tommy second by lucy i'm assuming no one is opposing that and so the meeting is adjourned at 12 31 a i mean p.m thank you thank you thank goodness yep

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