Travis County Commissioners Court
August 15, 2006
Item 10
Number 10 he, receive presentation of fy 2007 budget agenda worksheet.
>> this is the next step in the budget process. You have completed your budget hearings yesterday and you now have between now and 5:00 next Friday, not this Friday, next Friday, August 25th, to consider all that you heard and identify those top picks that you wish to discuss. This is an agenda worksheet. It is a worksheet to allow you to determine what you want to talk about. You have two versions of this worksheet, the long version, the short version. The long version is 21 pages. That contains every single budget request, plus new ones or modifications or alternatives. Not all of those were discussed in budget hearings whavment we did was place on the left-hand corner on the long version an asterick next to those things that were talked about at a budget hearing. This is the same process we've done every year for awhile. And then everything that was talked about at a budget hearing gets placed on the short version, and that's nine pages lopg. Some of you like the long version, some of you like the short version. We give you both so that everyone will like what they have. The short version is much easier to deal with. But there may be certain circumstances where you want to refer back to the long version to gain some understanding. Five of those pages deal with the issues surfaced during departmental hearings. The other four are more central in nature. They are the reserves, the space issues, the compensation issues, security issues that surfaced during the budget hearings. You will notice that some of the lines are regular font and some of the lines are bolded? What does bold mean? We bolded those items that either are brand new requests that were never submitted as part of the original submissions in may, but were submitted to you as part of the budget hearings or variations of existing requests. Some departments said, well, I asked for four, but I'll take two of whatever. So the original four is listed and the two, which is a new variation, is bolded. Or in some cases a department said I want a million dollars for maintenance of current effort and they talked to you about one little piece of that. That million dollars might have been composed of 12 different subparts. What we did is we split that million dollars into its 12 parts and then listed those parts that were discussed at a budget hearing. That's the technique that we have used to try to make sense and help you cut through all of the various variables and focus on those variables that you want to discuss. What I urge you to not put a check if you don't want to talk about it. If you want to talk about it, put a check. If you write notes, we will replicate those notes precisely as you wrote them. We will not edit them. So some have suggested we should, and we would rather not. So that you can speak to your colleagues through our notes. There is a fine line between -- you have been urged to do this independently, and I will repeat the urge to do it independently for a variety of reasons that you have been briefed in other sessions. What we will do is take your check marks when we receive all of your agenda worksheets by 5:00 on Friday the 25th. We will then put together an agenda markup -- excuse me, a mark up-agenda for you where we list at the beginning of markup and we'll present this on August 29th the results where five of you want to talk about x and four of you want to talk about y, and then that will set the stage for mark up-because usually when five of you want to talk about something, you talk about it first. I urge you to ask any analyst any question if you have some need to refresh your memory. Oh.
>> forget about this or what is it that they said about that or why is it present this had way? Each analyst worked with the departments to have the phrases and descriptions that are here, and to the degree that any of your notes are different than what's here, come by, ask questions. You may find people talking with you more than they've talked to you in the past in the next 10 days about what's here and what's not here. And that's part of the process.
>> could you send us a cheat sheet of each analyst and which divisions that they are responsible so that we can direct it to the appropriate person? [ inaudible ].
>> yes, we will send what we call assignments as opposed to the cheat sheet so you know exactly what analysts are responsible and work with what departments.
>> thank you.
>> and you may ask the departments. You may want to come down and talk to jessica real about something in tnr or you may want to ask somebody in tnr about something in tnr. Those are your choices. And I also urge you, if you have not had a chance to read the planning and budget office write-ups, please do so. Some of you want to know why something is not in the preliminary budget. Those reasons are articulated in those write-ups. There's -- and the reasons are for you to consider, but there are reasons and you may or may not agree with those reasons, as to why those items are not in the preliminary budget. All of what's here are those items that in essence did not make it into the preliminary budget. I think that's about it.
>> the long form shows what is in the preliminary budget.
>> yes, it does.
>> and the short is what is not in the preliminary budget. So we will be adding these items to the preliminary budget?
>> actually, the long form shows what's in and what's not in. It's egg. It's everything. Certainly the short form is a layering in of what is not in the preliminary budget because typically the departments did not come to you and say please remove something from the preliminary budget.
>> just wanting to make sure I understand.
>> you also, if you --
>> explain that difference again. The short form is what now?
>> the short form contains only those topics that were discussed at budget hearings. The long form -- and let me explain what the genesis of the long form is. It starts on may 25th with 400 budget requests ', and what we do is we just put those on the long form. And we then verify the numbers. Sometimes someone says I want -- my budget request is for x dollars and we scrub it and say, well, it really is not x, it's x plus whatever. So -- and that is actually produced in the appendix of the preliminary budget. So it starts with a listing of all the requests. Preliminary budget comes along and those requests are shown as what part of the requests, all or some, is in the preliminary budget. So that gets dropped in. Then budget hearings come along.
>> short form.
>> and people have options or they say I have an alternative or members of the court say, please put down what we really need to decide upon. That gets bolded on the long form.
>> the long form is a short form plus options that surfaced during the budget discussions.
>> no.
>> then what's the long form?
>> everything.
>> all right. That's good enough.
>> the short form is stuff that was talked about at the budget hearings in all of the variations that you were presented with.
>> and the way I see it or interpret it is -- because it was at the budget hearing it's not in the preliminary budget yet.
>> that's correct.
>> so do you expect the short form to be completed and returned or the long form?
>> you can work with either one. The short form is a heck of a lot easier to work with. If I were in your shoes I would only work off the short form. Irtion because the long form has the preliminary budget in it and those are in there.
>> but you might want to -- and I'll give you an example. Let's just look at the short form under i.t.s. And you will see under line 14, original request, 9 their thousand in general fund, 3 million plus in capital. That's made up of a wide variety of exoapt parts. -- component parts. The long form shows number 14 appeared shows 14, a, b, all the way to 14 it-o. Not all of those were talked about at the budget hearing. The head of its came forward to you and said, there's parts of this that I want you to fund that were not funded. That happens to be 14-c, d, e, f and a couple of new ones so. That shows up on your short form. If -- so when you look at the reference number, you'll see the short form has 14-c. You may say, what's a and b? You can go to the long form if you're so inclined. So you can dwriew as a resource on your own or you can come down to planting and budget office -- planning and budget office and tiewkt appropriate analyst or leroy or me and we'll help guide you through it. This is no different than what you've grappled with in the past. And what it does, though, is it allows for the markup to go very quickly because markup will start on August 30th Wednesday, Wednesday. And then Friday, September first. If you wish to address tax issues, the tax rate, it will need to be done at the front end of markup or else we don't have enough time to deal with any modification to any tax rate other than the effective tax rate. There are certain scheduling and legal requirements and adds and public hearings that you must follow so that that's another reason why it's important for you to feel comfortable tuned allow markup to go smoothly. Which it has every year since we've been doing this.
>> any additional comments, whether we need them or not?
>> no comment. [ laughter ]
>> this is due the 25th?
>> in the judge's office because the judge is the setter of the agenda s so you submit it to the judge's office, we will begin to start harassing you on Thursday the 24th if you have not provided it to him, to remind you -- five p.m. At the judge's office.
>> you don't mean harassing, you mean kindly start putting in reminder notes.
>> it's all in the eye's of the be holder.
>> can you give me your best guesstimation of how many additional dollars we are going to have beyond the preliminary budget number?
>> you will be -- I believe that you will be having sufficient dollars to take care of the compensation issues that have been presented before you. And I do deeply believe that. For a wide variety of reasons.
>> all of the compensation issues or just the twhawnz we were talking about the five percent that are covered by five percent?
>> the rank and file compensation issues. I do not believe there's enough money to do what everybody wants. I believe there's enough money to do what many of you have focused on.
>> and that includes green circles.
>> the various -- yes. If, for example, you were so inclined to go with a hybrid model, for example, I believe there would probably be sufficient resources to do that. Now, beyond that, I believe that you are going to have a strategic challenge because I believe that you're going have some additional one-time money. You may find another million or so or two million, but some one-time additional resources. But you are going faced with a slug of ongoing requests. We are already slightly out of balance with respect to one time versus ongoing, so the challenge will be whether you move the budget and the fiscal balance more in 2007 towards using one-time money for ongoing expenditures, which will balance the budget, but it will create a ratchet in tw '08. We already are fatting facing a ratchet in '08. That is, I believe, one of the strategic issues that you'll be facing, and so it's probably hell thoi healthy tostart mulling it now.
>> but bottom line, if we take care of compensation at the four to the five percent range, whichever one that's going to be, be if we do that, then anything else other than some one-time money opportunities, we don't need to start checking things that we want to talk about because unless we're going to raise the tax rate above the effective tax rate, we're not going to are the money to do it in your opinion.
>> in my opinion I believe that is the case. And indeed, part of this process is for you to balance impact on taxpayer with impact on services and impact on quality of life and responsiveness. And that balancing act is something you do, which is taxes, services tion holding one down, modifying another.
>> you'll have a fourth revenue estimate next week, and so in essence for your checking I think it's some of you may say I'm willing to go beyond the effective tax rate and I'm going to put my check there. Some of you may say, I'm not willing to do that, so don't put your check there. That'sious part of the process. You'll be able to discuss it in full on an item by item basis during -- at the beginning of mark up-.
>> if you want to make this thing real easy and you didn't want to go above the effective tax rate, we could turn this over to you right now and say I'm happy with what we're going do, happy with the compensation and we'll see you. That's effectively what you could do.
>> yes. You could do that.
>> I don't know whether everyone would do that.
>> we're working on the fourth revenue estimate now by line item. This is the important one so we are making decisions based on it and whether you need more money. Christian is absolutely right. That's going to come out to 1.5 million. It may come up to slightly more than that, but I don't see a significant increase. And he's right, there will be an increase in the one-time money in terms of fund balance and that's kind of an analysis, you're workogbudget, but the departments are still doing business. So it's estimating what we think the departments are going to spend as opposed to what revenue we think is going to come in ultimately at year end. So there's a balancing of that and a judgment call. We are also going through any accounts or issues that we think need to be cleaned out, which might free smup money. But painly those things are one time and we're holding up a liability. We don't have a liability anymore, we reduce it and it drops into fund balance. One of the things that's on my mind is because on Thursday I'm speakogthe Texas association of counties group last night I believe every member but one said they were committed to a four-cent tax increase. I think we'll see that from the cool board. The hospital district came in and asked to come to roll back and of course that's your decision. I've only seen the city's preliminary budget, and because of the huge increase in sales taxes, that budget does not increase property taxes. But I like to see what the rest of the community is sort of doing. And that's just those observations.
>> thank you very much.
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Last Modified:
Tuesday, August 16, 2006 12:08 PM