Item 01: Budget Presentation & Financial Update

COSM_Admin

Administrator
Staff member
Receive a Staff presentation and hold discussion regarding the Fiscal Year 2021-2022 Financial Update and preliminary Fiscal Year 2022-2023 Budget, and provide direction to Staff.
 

JHughson

CoSM Members
Slie 19, page 23 pf packet
Stormwater is requesting 4 more positions and $490K in capital requests to be paid from Stormwater fees.
I thought we were running tight or short (even with the increase) in this account.
How will we afford this?
What positions are you seeking?
 

COSM_Admin

Administrator
Staff member
Response provided by Anna Miranda, Interim Director of Finance:
Stormwater is requesting 4 more positions and $490K in capital requests to be paid from Stormwater fees.
I thought we were running tight or short (even with the increase) in this account. We are meeting on the stormwater rate model on July 8th. Any increases in personnel or equipment will be limited to what is indicated by the rate model. Current year revenues are meeting budget projections in FY22.
How will we afford this? Cost savings in contract services, increased revenue within 6.5% communicated to Council in prior year.
What positions are you seeking?
LID and neighborhood services Crew comprised of:
  • (1) Crewleader
  • (3) Equipment Operators
 

MBaker

Council Member
What concerns might we have about using the Hays Appraisal data since they seem to have used confidential MLS data, thereby increasing the taxes owed by our residents? Are we party to any legal action against the appraisal district, or should we be seeking clarification from them about the standing of any pending litigation? Would it benefit us to reach out to our residents to let them know they might consider protesting their values? Also, aren't there groups that help people protest their taxes and only get paid if they win the protest (first thing on Google - https://www.poconnor.com/), would it be helpful to partner with a group like this for our community?

Are we able to take money from economic incentives and direct them to only fund specific projects? Instead of going to the general fund, could they be directed towards equity, workforce development, child/elderly care facilities, etc.?

Pulling apart the "cost driver" of fuel, I wanted to better understand the extent to which we are accelerating plans for electric vehicles? Also curious to what extent we've explored savings through work from home, digital/telephonic customer service, varying our hours of operation to avoid traffic, and better incentivizing carpooling and use of City vehicles? Could there be a "City work School bus", get everyone's address and plan an efficient route? Often budgets work on assumptions of the past and economic predictors, but there seem to be creative opportunities and room for new approaches to problems we've seemed to assume unsolvable.

Realizing it to be an obtuse question but still wanting to challenge us to think differently about our budget -
Are we growing with an end in mind, either geographic, economic, or service level oriented?

When I see the total requests on the general fund as 10.9 million but knowing we can't fund it all, shouldn't we be able to make a plan to meet those requests by x date? Sure things will change every year, but many of those requests will only compound until they are addressed despite whatever new challenges we're facing.

We've been tasked with smart growth and more and more people want us to clarify what that means, and I think a lot of that starts here in our budget. When we think about living in San Marcos long term and serving all of the public's needs, to some extent the budget itemizes those desires and we prioritize them each year. So if we're only X million away from meeting all the budget requests, we have a number to work towards and can better measure our success of getting there. So for instance framing economic incentives in a way of saying "we'll only need x many more of this size to achieve our goal of (insert staff/capital/operations item here) by this date."

I realize this is all last minute and don't expect a response to some of this more philosophical stuff, but just figured I would get this out of my noggin ahead of the meeting to give everyone time to think about it.
 
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