d and i'm one of your five commissioners and today we're going to be talking about our budget process here today with me is our director of financial in ministration miss kelly strickland how are you i'm doing great i know that the budget is not a flashy subject but it's what makes the will burn in our city and saw one of those head you kind of explain to our community the budget process since typically we approve a budget in the summer going into the fall because of the fiscal year can you just kind of dissed briefly explain how our budget process works i can't and i got to tell you it may not be exciting to song but i love the budget but the way that made it the budget is our plan of action everything that happens in the city is because of what we have in the budget what we have available the budget process we start in january with working with on the c ip and then we move on we do a budget kickoff for our departments where we give our departments instructions about  what they need to include in their budget if it's a year that we feel like that our revenues are not going to be there we ask them to be that extreme likes conservative and what they're producing  if there are needs that they have heard through the citizens through commission or just in their area they're encouraged to put that in their budget as a budget issue and that process goes through a lot  assistant city manager and city manager whoever that direct report is then that goes to the finance office and we included in the budget you mentioned an acronym earlier the c i p and in our world we know that that's a capital improvement projects is our strategic plan can you talk about how the strategic plan ties into how we set our budget i can we are currently in year three of the three year strategic plan as you know there are different there about seven different strategic plans that are in this and they each have key key points one where putting together the cia we look at that and we match it up to a strategic plan one of those to see if that is is what the commission has given us as a path to go for for the three years right and one of the items of our city's a plan is parks and recreation and the city is well aware that we have done a mass undertaking in terms of establishing a parks and recreation district and aligning dollars in order to improve our parks expand our inventory of parks in address trees and canopy which is so important our community what you're going to see this year in our budget process rec district and what we've done is we've taken the general fun we've lifted the parks and rec operations out of there and we've moved it over into a special revenue fund what does it mean to the homeowner when they see their tax bill going forward for parks and rec district and the city milledge so we're in our budget process we've allocated a portion of that total milage over to the park the car and when we start the budget process you always give us a presentation t kind of takes a dollar and chops it up in pieces can you kind of just explain to the community where their dollars go yes if you take a look at the tax bill you're going to see your county portion you're going to see your special district portion you'll see your debt service portions in that county and city and does service you'll see your arm special your water management districts and so you see all the dollar bill is cut up in in those sections and the county because it's bigger you're going to see a dollars which is which is very nice those funds the police they find the planning finance they planned they're going to fund the parks  streets and highways all of the operations of the city so when we see infrastructure projects going on around where it relates to streets and roads where do those funds come from or does it just depend on the project it depends on the project but primarily those will be paid for out of either your gas tax funds are your penny sell stocks look a penny sales tax specifically for infrastructure in the city gas tax has to be transportation related so we have the zero dollars five cents gas tax which is specifically for infrastructure we have also the st zero dollars seven cents which we can pay for operations of transportation and capital transportation because we hear the term in our commission meetings pretty regular as it relates to budget to the general fund can you talk to residents about what the general fund means and just an overview of what's in there right so the general fund is operating fine this is where  you pay for your police any revenues that are put there the taxes i'm communications service tax sales tax they're all general revenues so those revenues pay for what it takes to operate this city the city commission any operation where you have people in your payroll that's an operating expense now keep in mind this year with a new district we were picking up the park somewhere put it over in a special revenue fine so that parks fine will pay for the going to the revenues what revenues do we see within the city i know that people are familiar with utility bills but there is a bigger piece of revenues can you just kind of explain where we get the revenues from the city to pay our bills sure you have  tox then we have this i mentioned before communication service tax you've got utility taxes franchise fees and there are charges for services which would be fees like for building just for services like the parks in pain part they pay to pay to play tennis bobby jones there's fees to play golf those are charges for services miscellaneous income would be like sell of surplus property if we had any any contributions that the city had another big revenue source or glance and that would be from either other governmental agencies or other private agencies  one of the things the city has set out to do is to really put some investment into affordable and attainable housing in our community we have a new fund or we have booted up the fund that helps with that can you explain how that affordable housing trust works well you know from the settlement with the county the county has contributed a one million dollars we have five hundred thousand dollars from our b p funds that we're going to put toward that as far as the program i'm afraid you'd have to talk to someone in the housing department should approach it on the money itself where does it fall within our budget it's going to be a special revenue far not just ok and those are start up funds so depending on the program usually not by the governing board but by an outside legislative source also we have a lot of oversight in terms of how we spend our phones in the accounting procedures and auditing process can you talk to us about how the city goes through the auditing process to make sure that we're in line with the general rules and those kind of things i can every year we do have an audit it starts with an interim audit in the summer and they just come in they take samples of payables in different areas where they're concerned they determine what grants that we have what meet threshold that they need to do more auditing in documents speaking of the auditors sure and usually our fiscal year in september th takes us a couple of months to close out the year and march st and we usually presented to the board about that tom and it we've done well in terms of our principles and accounting procedures in the city has been awarded in that regard we have i think we're on your thirty seven on th so we're that you know the kaffir is one of those documents they feel it in the calf or in the city of sarasota it's going to be the same format as every document within this nation there's a specific format that we have to go on that now the budget being a financial plan we have a little bit more lead way gotcha on that so what we try to do with the budget is fix it so that it is most readable for our citizens and that they understand how our city is spending our money right the city does a series of workshops that the public can participate in to determine what the forecast is this to what the upcoming budget is going to be we usually do that in our summer months starting maybe late april may can you talk to the residents of about how that process works i can we just received our june preliminary estimates for the assessed value that helps us a lot we will receive the official estimate on july st or st workshop is july th and night that will be all day workshops and will start at eight thirty in the morning we'll start with our general  fund we will go all day long and what we do is i give an overview to let you know just in whole how we're doing in the budget give you an overview of our revenues how they're projected  taxes and then will narrow it down into each specific department because each department will get up and present their portion of the budget and this usually last day and then part of the  the nd day will go through all of the funds will start with the general fund on the st day the next day will do our enterprise our special revenue bonds internal service funds and our debt service funds we should get through around three o'clock which at that point will stop them will break into a special city commission meeting so that us commissioners can make any decisions or changes that you want and the budget or talk about milledge that's an issue there in those days those workshops are open to the public yes and the department directors will be available to answer questions that the commissioners may have about the different parts of the budget right there right the other thing that i wanted to ask is that you keep mentioning setting the millage what to sell in the millage mean well if the sest values are high enough that the budget that's presented equals if it's my job to present a balanced budget  increase right but that potentially gives the city the ability to get closer to a strategic plan to accomplish the goals that it set forth in the society because we have that increase right now and when we come in we present a budget to you we'll present it as it is then we will present it with any levels of service that we have been asked to present and then we have our costs that are there's not a lot that we can do about we have pension costs we have there's some cost in there that we don't have any control over it as they're going up health insurance to one sure so we had to take that consideration is really hard to say ok we had a budget of fifty million this year we're going to have a budget of fifty million this next year because potentially you've got these costs that are going up we have no control over so if you're going to do that then there will be cuts involved we're not in that situation right now and what what do you perceive our current budget to be before changes to the the total amount the total amount  as the total budget i don't have those numbers right now but our our operating our general fund is looking really good and do you know where we were last year in terms of where we ended up as far as our our budget for last year well one thing we had to take into consideration this year were taken a big chunk were taken the parks and rec out so last year we had a sixty eight million dollars budget but we're taken eight million dollars out of that to create the park center right  so what i've done this years after parents are reports for the commission that so that they can see apples to apples what the general fund looked like last year without the parks interact so that you can see the increase or decrease and the same is there are going to be we're presenting six police officers in this budget we are presenting twelve or percent of fund balance available because we're a coastal city and we have these things happen and we choose to have a higher fund balance and that is our preparation that way if we do have a hurricane like we can go to our fund balance to cover the costs that we need to write are we still receiving funds from earlier in our allocations from fema with regard to the two previous storms we are we've just received her main we have not yet received my funds yet and so the a lot of times in a community doesn't understand why it takes so long again we're dealing with federal dollars and so there is federal process that the city doesn't have any control over that is correct and  a finance director i don't budget those revenues coming in because i don't know when they're coming and sure sure with regard to our expenditures when we're planning for capital improvement projects  particularly with our new parks and rec district we're capital improvement for the parks and rec would be moved to the new parks and rec district for funding or does it still stay in the capital improvement plan or from a funding perspective how does that those are going to stay la th from a calendar perspective for the communities benefit what happens next after that the next regular city commission meeting we set the tentative milledge and at that point when the commission sets the millage it cannot be increased after that it's tentative but you can increase it the next meetings are in september we have to public hearings at that time that milledge could be lowered but it couldn't be increase and  the nd public hearing in september is when the budget is adopted and for the public spin if it if they want to speak to issues of the budget when do they get to do that they're going to do it they can't speak during a workshop but they can speak at a meeting so  three o'clock on the th of july we'll open it up into a regular city commission meeting or special city commission meeting and they can come up and speak at that point i noticed a cool thing on the website there is a place on the we're doing this i can early in the process our city manager tom morrow and ask us to put this out there to create a form that budget that citizens could actually ask questions our ask why something isn't in the budget here is in the budget now we haven't got very many responses on this which is why we're talking about it today so that people in the community can know that you can go to our city's website and you can actually submit questions and recommendations about our budget who does this go to this it goes to me ok and how do we as commissioners get the information because we want to know what information you receive right well currently have been sent in to the city manager who called as i said i haven't got very many measures that people don't know it's there and this is a new communication platform so i'm really hoping that the community takes advantage of this and really will take the time we get phone calls and e mails but this is another way to get that information directly to the finest department if there are questions about the process if there are questions about the budget if you want something added in taken out and then did or whatever this is the place to do it right how long have we had this up on the website i it's probably been up since january and how much feedback would you say you've gotten i've probably got about four ok all right so this is the plug so if you want to please give us your comments and your feedback we want to hear from you as a community as to if you have questions what you'd like to see this really helps would you agree yes it is with regard to once we set the millage rate and go into our public hearings during that two day public hearing workshop what does it look like for the community what can they expect well they can expect to see a lot of the department heads coming to the table to talk about their departments talk about the expenditures that they're working on there's there is no public input allowed there so it is my goal as finance director to make sure that the commission sees every part of the budget that they're adopting i try not you know it's very long so i don't want to i try not to speed it up because i think that this is important that you see everything that we're talking about i think the st hour or so i talk about the budget and i try to do a lot of education in that how the budgets put compound and then you'll see you know one by one department heads coming down and talking about their particular department or find one of the things that i think is important that the community has kind of told us as elected officials is that they don't know where their money is going they see the bill they know that they're paying taxes and paying their utilities but they don't see where their money goes i think the workshop is a good opportunity to understand  this is where my utility bill goes is just where a funds if i go to workout or play tennis this is where this money goes when building happens in the community that's where these funds get pulled down from right it's it really helps to  get an understanding as to how do we pay for the city to run and what are the fisa come in that help us to do our job right i would say to just that's a very good point there during the workshops they'll see that when we talk about water and sewer and people think about the water bill that they're paying that is to provide for the water and sewer system those dollars can't go anywhere else except for the water and sewer system when we talk about the capital project funds those are what we're doing the buildings and the roads and the dollars are restricted for that purpose so they're there's a lot of education in the workshop of how the dollars that will come in can be spent is there anything new about this year's budget process that our community needs to know about or any anything good we really want to hone into as we go into our last few minutes our budget process this year has run very smoothly with the increase in the assessed value as that's taken a burden off of us as far as trying to find dollars to do the new services that we have planned this year there is really no big changes in the process and we hear the president's talking about let's be cautious because we don't know what the market is going to do we don't know where their building is going to continue to stay where it is or where there's going to be a drop how have we addressed it from a budget perspective in terms of the way that we're thinking about the budget process  this is it a combination of the two how would you describe the philosophy i think is we have been cautious this year from the budget kickoff when the city manager gave his message to the departments is to be very cautious because in the past years we've had the past two years we've had a lot of increase in our sense values we've increased our services so we we need to grow into what we have and that was the message that was given this year ok what i want to do is i want to give this information to the community again because we do want the public to utilize this tool if you go to our website at sarasota f l dot gov there is a place it's titled twenty and twenty budget citizen input and it has a place for questions in a place for suggestions and then you submit the information above that kelly it has your e mail but if people want to call and have questions about the budget worship they call they could call the city manager's office and then they would send it to me but i'm the one that they need to call ok and is there ever a point where it's too late to submit this information i mean of course not september but i mean the point is that there's still time i think that there's still time because there's always time because it if there's something that we need to do we want to know about it and if use give us something now and we can do it this year we can know that we need to incorporate that in a future year i think all of the comments are important while just want to mind our residence of the dates that are coming up our budget workshops are july our new budget so please reach out to our community place we are commissioners to the finance department go to the website complete this form we want to make sure that you're engaged with the budget process and that you have an understanding as to how your dollars are funding our city