2007 0917 Special City Commission Meeting - Budget

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Summary Minutes: Special City Commission Meeting September 17, 2007 First Budget Hearing Sunny Isles Beach, Florida City Manager Szerlag went over the Fiscal Year 2007/2008 Revenue Summary with an overall proposed budget of $26.9 Million Dollars, Expense Summary with a proposed operating budget of$19.3 Million Dollars, lower by $1.5 Million Dollars, and the Operating Budget is a subset of the General Fund Budget, essentially it is the General Fund Budget minus Capital transfers, debt service, and contingencies. He said that there are $1.5 Million Dollars start-up costs for the following: Community Center $646,000.00; Wireless Island $322,000.00; Landscaping $260,000.00 and this is because we are increasing landscaping with the addition of Pelican Community Park, with the biggest impact being maintenance of the baseball field; and other staff and related costs of $250,000.00. City Manager Szerlag said that personnel costs are still the largest portion of the budget of 60% of the O&M budget, with total personnel expenditure for Fiscal Year 2007/2008 of $13.2 Million Dollars which is a 4% decrease over last year's budget, supplies and services costs decreased from $7.1 Million Dollars to $6.1 Million Dollars, and with a centralized Purchasing System we will see even a further reduction next year. He said the Capital Outlay Budget (General Fund only) has decreased from $1.1 Million Dollars to $170,000.00 because we are not buying or we are buying very few vehicles, and what we want to look at for next year is to have more of a trend line that we can take a look at and charge departments for vehicular usage every year in the budget so it doesn't have ups and downs when it is time to buy vehicles, it is a more steady operational cost per year. Public Speakers: none Assistant City Manager/Finance Douglas Haag noted that there are two addendums, Addendum 1 and Addendum 2. He summarized the changes in Addendum 1 to the General Fund is a reduction in the total budget of about $133,000.00, and we discussed some of those items previously in terms of some of the changes involving the health insurance, worker's comp accounts, also some adjustments on the revenue side. He said the other good point is that, originally when we started off with the General Fund budget we had anticipated having to draw down on the General Fund balance of about $642,000.00 and that is now down to about $212,000.00 (last page of Addendum 1, Budget Summary - All Funds), so the good news is the net, we picked up more on the revenue side than expenses. On the expense side we also increased our interest projections, those revenues for General Fund of about $150,000.00. He said the other significant item in terms of dollar amount is we revised our projections based on a more realistic start-up date for Wireless Island, the original projections included in the original budget proposal in July was based on a full 12 months, now we are two months away from the end of Fiscal Year and Wireless Island will not go live on October 1 sr, so we revised those estimates to be more realistic and there is a significant reduction there. Vice Mayor Thaler asked if the numbers for Pelican Community Park will stay the same, and Assistant City Manager Haag said yes, but the net adjustments we have made since July are reflected here, so since the original July proposal, we increased some of the line items in Cultural and Human Services. City Manager Szerlag said that Mr. Haag is correct, at our last workshop session we presented three options and we selected the middle option, which was essentially the start-up for the preponderance of Cultural and Human Services Director Susan 3