Town Manager's Recommended Budget Fiscal Year 2026-2027

[laughter]

Rayan, have you ever had dry needling? You've done dry needling? Oh, wait. Yes, I have. Yeah. Where'd you have it at? I did it in my lower back. Okay. Where where what part of your body? Back, okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Oh. But I'm going to tell you You know what they're doing, yeah? Yes, I'll take it. Yeah, man. So, then I will need a copy because I start [snorts] off Okay, okay. Yes, sir. All right, yes.

Looking can really change the the atmosphere. Yeah. All right, sir. Sorry, I didn't mean No, you're good. I know you got your hands full.

All right. All right, good afternoon, everyone. We'll go ahead and call this meeting to order for April 16th, 2026. Um let's stand for the pledge of allegiance if you don't mind and I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right, thank you. Before we move on to manager Bossburg, I do want to make some acknowledgement of superstars today. Um another trip around the sun. We have the public works director John Mullis, electric utilities director Kathy Moyer, and HR director Carmen McGee. So, we can't do anything without warming our voices up and saying happy birthday. We're going to do it real quick. Why not? I mean, we got to celebrate, all right? On the count of three. 1 2 3, happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday, John, Kathy, and Carmen.

[laughter]

Happy birthday TO YOU.

[applause and cheering]

ALL RIGHT, THANK YOU FOR THAT. UH WE'LL TURN IT OVER TO manager Vosburg. I know there's been a lot of work going into this and I do want to start off by saying my understanding is today we're just receiving. Okay, not too many questions, just receiving. There'll be more time for that right as we move on. Okay. All right, thank you. And we have a video that we want to kick things off with. Okay. Maybe.

[laughter]

Alan's going to help me. So we have a a clip for you. This is in the vein of like a movie trailer. Okay. So we're going to set this before we kick into this awesome process.

[clears throat]

You're all about the thrilling news of the day. We want to start with our video. Oh, wow. Look at that. In a year of slowing growth and increases in annual revenues, the town

turns towards one mission above all. Stability. As the town manager prepares the draft budget, every decision builds towards long-term balance. Stability for team Apex looks like retaining our subject matter experts across all departments by paying them competitively and making sure they have enough team support to manage workloads. Stability in town infrastructure means we create [music] and maintain systems through long-term planning that work the way our community expects with consistency and safety and impeccable service delivery. Economic pressures rise, equipment and infrastructure project costs climb, revenues tighten. Public safety, IT resilience, fleet reliability, focused priorities to reinforce the systems that keep the town strong. Public safety is [music] one area where stability has the biggest impact. When residents feel protected [music] and responders feel prepared, communities thrive. Having enough staff and making ongoing investments in training and technologies build on that solid foundation. Through CIP scoring, director retreats, and every step of the budget process, the goal is clear. Strengthen our footing to prepare for the years ahead. As a department head, it was great to work with the other directors to understand their needs and work as a group to balance the budget as a team. It was one of the most collaborative and best budget processes I've ever gone through today. This spring witness the budget designed not just to survive slowing growth, but to stay strong through it. WOOHOO! YEAH!

[applause]

I WILL SAY MY VOICE IS NOT James Earl

Jones.

[clears throat]

That's well done. Yeah, thank you. Thank you to our team, uh awesome comms team that put that together. Stars, Shawn, Marty, Demetria, thank you. Jonathan was in that as well. Jonathan's over here. Great job, guys. All right, thank you, Alan. Mhm. So I I want to start I want to thank you for being here. I know you've got uh busy days and we appreciate it. Uh I want to echo what the mayor said that consistent with last year, uh we want to present the information. We're going to give you the budget books. All the There's a lot of information. You're going to have a lot of questions for us and we welcome them. We just would like you to hold them today. Uh so we do appreciate that. And I want to say a few thank yous before we start. First of all, I'd like Jessica and her entire budget team to stand up. TREMENDOUS EFFORT. [applause and cheering] AWESOME JOB. [applause] I WANT TO THANK THE ADMIN TEAM. IF you all would stand up, please.

[applause]

And then everyone else in the room on the leadership team and our directors that participated in the budget, if you would please stand up as well. THANK YOU. [applause]

THIS THIS WAS A A BIG EFFORT AND AS Jonathan mentioned, um I'm I'm biased on this, but I think our best effort yet in terms of budget and it took everybody in the room and people that aren't in the room as well. Uh so a lot went into this. Uh the budget that we are presenting today is built on a simple but essential idea of stability. Stability in the infrastructure that our residents rely on every day, stability in the workforce that delivers those services, and stability in our financial approach as we navigate a more uncertain economic environment. This year's process made a few things clear. We are operating in a time of tighter revenues, rising costs, and longer timelines for critical

equipment and projects. At the same time, the expectations of our community have not changed. They still expect safe neighborhoods, reliable utilities, responsive services, and a high quality of life. The budget is designed to meet those expectations without losing our footing. You'll see a continued, deliberate investment in infrastructure, roads, utilities, and facilities, because that is the backbone of a stable and growing [snorts] community. You'll also see a disciplined approach to staffing, focusing on adding positions where they are most needed to maintain service levels, particularly in public safety and core operations. At its core, this recommendation is about balance, maintaining what we do well, strengthening the systems that support our future, and making thoughtful, sometimes difficult choices to close a significant gap while protecting the long-term health of the organization. This is not a budget that chases everything. It's a budget that prioritizes what matters most to keep Apex steady, reliable, and positioned for the future so that we can live up to our motto of the peak of good living. With that said, we look forward to taking you through the budget. It's going to be, as the process was, a very collaborative presentation. Uh I'm going to kick off a few slides. I'll invite Jessica, our budget director, to come up and do a few uh slides as well. And then we will hear from our portfolio managers uh and then I'll come back up at the end. With that, let me get my clicking going here. Here is our agenda for the day. We will talk to you about the budget process. For those of you in the finance committee meeting the other day, this might be a little repetitive, but we believe it's it's worth the entire council seeing. A lot of time has been spent spent on the process. Uh you're going to get this budget and have roughly a month and a half-ish to mull it over and to make it yours. Uh this has been in the works for well over half a year. Right? Over 6 months

of work have gone into this process uh to get us where we are today. And that's done by all the the professionals behind me that were focused and deliberative in their approach. Uh most importantly, um I believe that adopting a budget is the single most important thing that we do as a local government. And I think it also differentiates us from our federal friends, right? And unfortunately right now it differentiates us from our state friends. Uh but it's something that we can do and it's important and and sends a message to the community about what the priorities are. So with all of that said, I'm going to invite Jessica up. We're going to get started in talking through the process and then we'll go into uh strategy, our budget overview, our portfolio recommendations, and next steps. So thank you, Jessica. All right. We're going to dive right into the budget process. Um as Randy said, this process started over 6 months ago when we put out a call for uh capital project uh requests. We took those requests in October and we worked with departments to create our initial draft to go to town management for review. While admin was reviewing, uh we put together a committee of um staff members who represent each element of the CIP to score the capital projects against objective categories. Uh we then implemented some admin review and um brought all of that back together for our capital work session with you all in December. So this gave us the opportunity this year to give an overview of all the projects with our project managers in the room to answer questions. We also had the opportunity to present that CIP committee scoring as well as our resident budget survey results to you before um it came to your prioritization. After this work session, um we sent out the CIP to you all to prioritize to set us up for our annual retreat. And this year um we did an exercise where we broke you all into teams to create your own capital budgets based on those projects

in the prioritization. Um we put the um funding capacity that we had and um gave options of additional funding and um both teams created their own uh capital budgets before coming back together to do team president presentations to uh explain priorities and what projects made it into the budgets. We then used um the projects that were prioritized by both teams to create the base of your cohesive uh group capital budget. Uh we then uh worked through what additional projects would fit within that budget. And in the end, 28 projects were funded within the immediate 5 years of the CIP and 15 removed out to the future. So it funded about 120 million in transport uh total. Uh 52 million in transportation projects, 44 million in facilities, and 23 million in parks and recs projects. So this was foundational um to the development of the FY27 budget because it gave us direction on what those core projects are for the future. We built a shared understanding of what the priorities and constraints and the impacts of our large-scale projects are. We ensured um project selections reflected the community through the survey, council through your priorities, and staff through scoring. And in the end, we aligned project funding requirements with the resources that we have available. And that um in the end included a 10% increase to the uh community investment fund, which you will see in uh this budget. At the same time as we are deep in our capital process, we're also starting some of our uh core budget processes. So, we start working on our personnel in October, where we work with departments to uh go through an outlook of what the next 4 years looks like for their staffing needs. And then departments work to collect performance metrics, operating costs, and justifications to put into a presentation for their personnel requests.

We then um in January send out the budget requests uh for departments to begin working on. And we move into our portfolio personnel meetings. So, this gives an opportunity to directors to present their personnel needs and um they're presented to uh the portfolio directors, the portfolio uh assistant town manager or deputy town manager, the town manager, and budget. And so, this allows everybody to see the needs of the group as a whole as opposed to just understanding individual needs. From there, we move into our department budget meetings, where um the department and their team meets with budget and their ATM, and um we discuss what the big priorities are for the year. We talk about any areas of their budget that we might need to adjust based on this year's trends. And that is what helps them kind of finalize their budget before submission. We collect proposed rate and free fee changes um at the end of February. And then immediately following, departments turn in their requests. So, at this point, we have all of the expenditure requests for the upcoming fiscal year. And so, we take a time at that point to start um putting that up against what we are seeing in terms of trends and challenges. So, um our population is continuing to grow. We're at about 80 just over 85,000 in 2026. Um but our development is um de- declining. the um CEO has issued an example of what we're seeing uh revenue side of that is our permits and fees are down 5% year over year, which is about a $200,000 impact to the general fund. Our average home value increased about 25,000 this year to 630,000. And then our median income household income in Apex um from the most recently available data was just over 144,000.

So, we take a look at all of these different metrics, and we use those um to help us get to our revenue projections. So, our property tax um was an area of challenge this year. There was a drop in county tax collection rate of 0.04%, which sounds very small, but that's about 200K per 10th of a percent. Um we also had our 2025 actual assessed value growth um at 4.02%. We originally projected this year for 5.4%, which um equates to about a billion dollars in assessed value lower than we had anticipated. That equates to $3.3 million of our tax revenue lower than we anticipated. And then for 2026, our projected rate is 3.2, so it's still declining. There's also proposed legislation on property tax reform um which is causing a lot of question marks. Sales tax is um ever evolving. It is a positive trend this year. Um we're up 7.1% year over year, which is fantastic. Um but federal [clears throat] level decisions are creating uncertainty and volatility in the market. One example of that is increased fuel costs uh and that directly impacts our sales tax revenue while also creating more operating expense for us. So, um this just moderates our increase that we're anticipating for next year. Additionally, interest rates are going down, which means our investment earning revenue is also decreasing um about 35%. That's a $1 million impact on the general fund, 220,000 on water sewer, and 100,000 on the electric fund. Then on the expense side, we are still seeing inflation. I know we just reported to finance committee that inflation was 2.4%, but they just released the update on Friday, and it's now at 3% over March of 2025. Um

we're seeing this in all areas um including our bids exceeding engineer estimates for capital projects. We've had a recent pump station come in 30% over initial estimates. LED light replacements has more than doubled. And um Salem Streetscape is another recent example that was 50% um higher than anticipated. We're also still seeing long lead times for equipment and vehicles. Fire engines, automatic side loaders, and transformers all still 2 years out. Electric poles 6 months. And this also affects our planning because we are having to invest in things that we don't even necessarily need for another 2 years for a program. Um and then of course, we have our personnel costs. So, we initially started this process with 57 positions requested.

[clears throat]

Um after personnel portfolio meetings, 34 of those moved forward to go into the initial um draft of the budget. And in the end, what you guys are receiving today has 18.5 as the final recommendation. Uh that has 16.5 um in general fund, one position electric, and one in water sewer. So, at 57, that was about $11 million, and uh the 18.5 brought us down to about $4 million um increase. In terms of compensation, um we're looking at status quo from last year with 5% as the average. But we are flipping the focus to be on the market increase as opposed to the merit increase this year. And that is to help head off some of the impact on our next fiscal year budget, where we plan to do a town-wide comp study. So, um we're hoping to take a little bit of impact um from next year as well. In terms of benefit increases, uh retirement for general employees is going up 0.76% and our law enforcement retirement is going up 1.01%. And then our health insurance is increasing 8%. So, all of these um

compensation and benefits increases, that's uh over $5 million, and that takes up all of the natural growth that we are seeing in our revenues before we um look at other funding sources. And now I'm going to pass it back to Randy. Before I go on to the next slide, uh Jessica ended on health insurance, and I did want to mention I want to do a a little bit of rumor control uh cuz things are swirling as we're getting into budget season, and we're looking at renewal. We're approaching open enrollment for our health insurance plan that will be May 4th. It's a 3-week open enrollment period. Uh so, I have a couple things I can share with you and the organization. More information will be coming from our HR department. They just sent out a lot of the meeting invites for uh educational sessions on the different benefits that we have. Uh first and foremost, we in the budget you're seeing today have not proposed a cut to the Peak Lifestyle dollars. Those are intact in the proposed budget that is before you today. And the second piece is that we are introducing a second health plan. Uh [clears throat] right now, everybody is on one health plan. Uh it the the base uh individual employee has no cost on that plan. We will introduce a second plan. One plan will remain at the current premium levels, which includes a free plan for employees. I'm going to say that one again. We will still what's proposed is a free plan for employees. And the second plan will be is the more benefit rich plan. Uh and it will have a small co-pay for the individual employees at $50 a month, so $600 for the year. Um and then tiered as you go into uh the different family plan, employee plus child, or employee spouse. Uh we have we're facing as uh Jessica indicated, an 8% increase in health insurance. That's on top of a double-digit health insurance cost increase that we had for current fiscal year. Uh so, we are having to diversify our options and look at different plans. But the two things I want to make clear today, we are not proposing a cut in the Peak Lifestyle dollars, and we will still have an employee plan that is no

cost in terms of premium. The big difference between the two plans, you will see different increases in cost to co-pays. An example for primary care in the higher cost plan, it'll be most likely a $20 co-pay. On the free plan, it'll probably be a $40 co-pay. Um so, you'll pay lower premiums or no premium still, but you'll have higher co-pays when you utilize that plan. So, um each of our employees need to utilize to to study that, and we'll we're here to help and educate on which plan works best for them. But we will still have a base plan that is free for our employees. Okay. Thank you for that.

[clears throat]

Now, this is kind of how it naturally flowed to Jessica came in my office. It's been a little while now, but I get a knock at the door, and it says, "Hey, Randy, I need to talk to you about the budget gap."

So, then she broke the news that we had a $24 million budget gap. All right, between projected revenues and where the expenditures came in. So, we said, "All right, let's get to work on the '24." And we said, "Where where do we start?" So, we rely on the things that have kept us stable. We've got a strategic plan in place. Uh we've got Game Plan Apex, which I brought. Uh a lot of our decisions are are based on that plan. We've got our budget priority survey, so we lean into what our residents are saying. We had the council data points from the different interactions we've had with you, including the CIP prioritization exercise that Jessica alluded to. And then we had our director's budget recommendation, which I'll talk a little bit about in a moment.

[clears throat and cough]

So, this is These are the highlights of the results from the community survey. This is broken again down by um different areas from our Game Plan Apex. Highlights under responsible development, 32% maintain and improve existing roadways. I won't read all of these. Uh existing parks and greenways, there's a a theme here of investment in infrastructure. If you look under economic vitality, expand infrastructure to support new and growing businesses. Uh so, you'll see that reflected in the budget, that continued investment in capital infrastructure.

Next, this is where uh finding balance and how how can we work with our leadership team uh to get to a budget that that everyone stands behind and supports. And uh we introduced a little uh some additional transparency steps. That first one listed is the director's budget presentation. Uh it sounds simple, but we came back after we've done all this work, and presented back to the leadership team and said, "Here's where we are on our budget. Here's our gap. We got a $24 million gap." So, they knew all the individual pieces that they had put forward, but didn't know the collective impact. Uh so, we presented that. Jessica did that one of our director's meetings. Uh and then she's politely called it a director's budget retreat. I called it a a director lock-in. And so, we had a Friday a [snorts] Friday afternoon where all of your wonderful smiling subject matter experts that you see in the room, we locked them in upstairs and we said, "Listen, there's a gap, and we need to figure this out, and what can you guys do with that?" There was some pre-work that they they queued up a lot of pre-work, actually. Um and a lot of work went into that. And so, the team it took What was it? 2 and 1/2 hours, maybe? 3 hours? 3 hours, and they came up with what we're calling kind of the director director version of the budget that they put forward. Uh so, we had that as an input point. Then we circled back with We took that to the admin team, uh worked with budget, uh did some tweaking, and then we followed up again with our portfolios, and went through uh getting closer and closer to the budget that we were going to present. And then we took input from those portfolio meetings once again, and then developed the budget that you see today. So, where did we start to work on that gap?

[clears throat]

Again, 24 million. We first looked to focus on costs. So, uh as we looked to grow our family and and add staff and resources, uh we felt like if we were struggling to maintain what we had, that we had to pull back on the growth of that staff. So, as Jessica pointed out, the 57 positions went down to 30-some positions, down to uh where we are now with the 16 and 1/2 in the general fund and a couple in the utility enterprise funds. So, we made a cut of around 2.9 million in personnel.

Uh with that, we also looked at the operating costs and and pulled back on some new initiatives. We made a cut of around 1.3 million on that category. And then in terms of our capital, we looked to see what areas we could stretch those resources for another year, another 2 years. Uh what resources would we pull back on because we had to cut back on new initiatives. Uh and also with personnel, if you bring a new facility online, you got to have people to operate it. So, if you're pulling back on personnel, you might have to pull back on facilities. So, that was a $10.3 million cut. So, roughly 14 million of the 24 came from cost cutting. Then the other half of the equation is where do we look at um for revenue? So, first check is let's look at our bank accounts. What do we have in our savings account? What do we have to leave in our savings account? What can we put to good work for the residents of Apex? Uh especially with interest rates being down, we don't want just money sitting around. We wanted to put it to use. Uh so, we felt comfortable looking and leveraging for $3.3 million from our fund balance. Uh and Jessica can address that's within all the policies set forward by the council. Uh so, $3.3 million there. Uh we also took another look at the services that we provide, and we believe this is going to be a trend going forward, all pending property tax reform, what that looks like. Uh but trying to get our services where they're self-sustaining to to the when we have an ability to have a fee. Uh so, one of the fees we looked at this year was yard waste. We've talked about that in work sessions, and getting that up to 100% cost coverage. Uh that equated to just under a million dollars at 900,000 with the fees related to yard waste. Uh and then that that left us with looking at a tax increase. Uh so, I'll I'll dive into that in a second. The dollar amount from that proposed tax increase is around $5.3 million. So, with the cuts in costs and the increases in revenue, uh we were able to balance and close that gap of the 24 million. This is a budget overview. We have crossed the quarter billion dollar mark as a budget for Apex when you're all in with our funds. Uh just quickly running down our general fund, around 125

million. Electric fund, just over 70 million. Water and sewer, about half that at 35 and some change. The non-major and capital expenditures, just over 27 million. And stormwater fund, uh almost close to $4 million. So, all told, about $262 million. Property tax rate, and we've got a lot more information on this. Uh we're proposing a 0.3914, which is about 3 and 1/2 cents over the current rate. Uh that does take into account the one penny that was proposed uh through the process related to capital when you all did the capital exercise. Electric rates, you can see the base charge of 29.75, uh and the 0.121252 per kilowatt. That represents a base rate increase of $1.75, and an increase in rates of 6.25%. And we've got some more detail on that. Uh water rates, 6.75 base charge. Uh we have a tiered consumption rate, but the base rate and volumetric rate will go up by 4%. Then sewer, a $12.58 cent base rate, and uh then 8.72 per 1,000 gallons. And that uh base rate and um volumetric increase will be 4% as well. Okay. This is an interesting chart. I could spend a lot of time here. I am going to spend uh a little bit of time on this one. Uh it's it's only two lines, right? But there's a lot of data contained here. That top line that you see, that is the average of Wake County, uh so all the jurisdictions uh minus Apex. I believe everyone's included in that. It's Okay. So, everybody's there. That is their tax rate and their history going back to 2015. And then the green line on the bottom is the Apex line. Uh so, if for comparison, you can see we are below the average. Uh but I I think there are a couple of other important things. Uh if you look, the gray is when we had it was post for reevaluation year. So, there are new tax rate coming in after reevaluations. Uh and and paying attention to those dips. I mean, there's historically been So, you kind

of ramp up, you reevaluate uh revalue properties, and then there's typically a drop in that tax rate, and then it comes back up, then you reevaluate, comes back down. So, a clear trend. Um not something that's unexpected. But I think there's a lot that you need to pay attention to as you compare even to other jurisdictions. Uh and and looking and I'll One thing I'll point out, if you look at the dip from uh '23 to '24, right? That's the when we went from 44 to 34 cents. What we did in Apex was a 22.7% decrease in our tax rate. Almost a 23% decrease. What the other jurisdictions did on average was 9.75. So, most of them did a 10%. And you could say, "Well, values went up more in Apex." Maybe that's true, but we have a lot of communities around us where their values went up just as much as Apex, I believe, or close to it. Uh but they lowered their tax rate by just under 10%, and we did they did. So, as you study other jurisdictions, and you may hear, "Oh, they're not going up in their rate." And that's I'm happy for them. Uh but for us, it's because we came down We we gave our residents You all gave our residents a pretty good tax rate cut in that reval year. Uh then you can look at where they they kind of landed. They went flat. Uh we've had to slowly creep back up. So, we've had increases for the next 2 years if you count what we're proposing here. Uh but that was such a large cut. If you look at our previous um reval year, we did 8.4% from 2020 to 2021. So, we were more than double, almost three times from a percentage standpoint, our our tax rate reduction from the previous reval. A couple other trends, like I said, we could spend a lot of time on this slide. We are in our second The proposed rate is the second year post reval. And if you pull that out from the last revals, we are at 0.3914. The previous years, we would have been at 0.41 and 0.4150. So, we are below uh

historically when you look at the second year out after a reval. Again, a lot of data. We could dive into it. Uh but I'm going to move on. We can come back to that later. Looking [clears throat] at where we're using our property tax dollars, this is the '25 to '26 comparison. Uh this is big picture. If you look at the blocks, you've got green general fund, uh about 39.14. The red is the capital investment just to our SIF, so the dedicated fund that you all established. Uh and I'll talk a little bit more about some additional capital. And then there's the one penny for affordable housing that was referenced uh this at our last meeting. You heard input on that, that at one point it was a penny and a half. Uh we have remained at one penny from '25. We left that in at one from 26. Diving in a little bit more on the increase in property tax this year, where are those dollars going? So, we've got 35.6 is the existing tax rate. You see that in green. We've put a penny towards public safety, and I'm going to dive into how this breaks down. Penny towards public safety, a penny towards our community investment fund. That was at your earlier direction. And then we've got a penny towards our fleet replacement program, which is also heavily public safety this year when we look at that. And then we've got about a half penny, 0.54, for our parks and rec and IT innovations. So, some detail on that. The penny for public safety, we've got personnel, operating, and capital costs. We've got six patrol officers, a corporal, a special investigations lieutenant, so that's eight positions to PD. We've got a fire inspector, so that makes nine. So, nine of the roughly 18 and a half positions are listed here in the penny towards public safety. There's the additional penny in the SIF. That was again indicated by you all at a work session. Then the fleet replacement program makes up that third major penny. We've got 25 police vehicles that we're proposing for replacement. And I'm sure when you get one-on-one with our chief, he can tell you current status of some of our vehicles. We've gotten behind on our replacement program. We went [clears throat] under the number

that was recommended for current budget year. So, that gap is only going to grow. So, we felt like 25 brings us closer to what we should be replacing and making up for years when we were under. But that just keeps us where we need to be, right? So, that it's not like, "Oh, we did 25 this year, we can only do five next year." We're at a level to where we've got to be at a pretty high replacement program on our police vehicles. So, one of our pennies is giving us 25 additional police vehicles. We've got four vehicles related to parks and recreation, and then one fire truck, which I know we've had some discussions on there. The last block there in yellow, that's related to parks and rec and smart cities. You've got a lot of IT innovations and smart city apps. We've had several meetings on this, discussions in our work sessions. This we felt like there was clear direction to continue to dive into this arena and to go down this path. And then we've also had a lot of feedback related to our senior center, the Halle, and the John Brown center for program expansions. And you you guys get the emails just like I do with residents that are on wait list for some of those programs. So, we're trying to get some relief there and bolster our ability to to host those programs. I actually want to go back to this right here. Talking about capital. We So, you can see the red blocks, and that's the 8 cents that are going into the community investment fund. We also, in the green blocks, there's a 12%, so you could color another three to four blocks, three and a half blocks. You can color those red. We have 12% of our general fund is also going towards capital in addition to what we are putting into the capital investment fund. So, I wanted to point that out. A lot of capital as we try to build and invest in our infrastructure. Okay, the proposed increase. So, we talked about the average home price. We've we've put it in here around 600,000. I think it was slightly above 600,000, but for ease of numbers, at the current rate, when looking at property

tax, that's $2,136. You can see the impact of each additional penny. It's roughly on the average home price about $60 in an increase. If you go to the full proposed increase, that's $2,348, or roughly $212 for the year for all of the services that we've outlined. That equates to $17.70 for based on the average home price. You can see 400,000 goes down to about $142 for a full year, $11.80 for the month. An $800,000 home, $283 for the year, or $23.60 for the month. I'm going to invite Jessica back up. So, we're going to hop into a high-level overview of all the major funds. The general fund is balanced at 124.6 million, and that's an 8.26% increase over the current amended budget of 115.2 million. We are using 3.3 million in fund balance. As we reported in our February retreat, we are at about 29% of our fund balance, and our policy is to be between 20 and 25. So, this stays keeps us above that 25 still, but allows us to use our money. So, we are replacing public safety radios. The I'm going to get this wrong. Self-contained breathing apparatus. It's the fire. 200k for replacement of those. Leaf truck replacement, fire panel and HVAC replacement at various town facilities. The Parks Olive Farmhouse upfit. The town campus stage, which is a 50% grant match from Wake County hospitality tax grant. Our town facilities generator study, IT infrastructure, and Apex Peakway at

Tingin Road intersection improvements. This dollar graphic just shows where every dollar in the general fund, how that is split up in what we spend. You can see here public safety is 41 cents of every dollar spent in our general fund. In terms of our personnel, operating, and capital, personnel remains the most significant investment as it does for most local governments. But as Randy alluded to, we've hit 12% of capital in our operating fund. And back in with the adoption of the FY23 budget our capital fell to about 9.3%, and you all set a goal to get that operating capital back up to 12%, and this budget accomplishes that. Looking at fees in the general fund, the solid waste fee, our yard waste collection increase is $3.05. That is bringing that program up to 100% cost recovery. And then our trash and recycling, the contract that we have in place has no increases for 2 years. So, those fees will remain the same. Moving into our electric fund, this fund is balanced at 70.6 million, and that is a 10.25% increase over the current year budget of 64 million. Purchase for resale is over 20% of that total increase dollar amount. Our NCEMPA rates are increasing 4.5% in July. And our standard rate model for electric has typically been about 4%. And with the charges for service being nearly 90% of the electric fund's budget that doesn't cover just our baseline increases. So, we do have a 6.25% increase to the base rate and energy rate. And that average

impact is in that 1150 range. So, the monthly change for our average resident would be $10.26. Now along with just general rate increases that we are also having to pay we are implementing a 5-year plan to restore reserves and strengthen the electric fund. Our current days cash on hand is 62 days. And our goal for the electric fund is 90 days. Now, cash on hand, it helps us manage revenue fluctuations, respond to emergencies, fund system maintenance without sudden and significant rate impacts. So, this approach allows us to maintain um stable service delivery while also positioning the electric fund for long-term sustainability. Moving to our water sewer fund, we are balanced at 35.6 million. This is a 13.9 percent increase over the current year budget of 31.3 million. And this fund has is following our um our rate model at the 4% increase to both base rates and volume rates. So, the total monthly impact on residents, our average is about 5,000 gallons, which is $3.39. And then finally, our stormwater fund is balanced at 3.7 million. This is a 4.16% decrease over the current year budget of 3.9 million. We did receive a very large grant this year in that fund, so that is the reason for that. So, but this upcoming year will be the first year where we are funding capital projects in the stormwater capital fund, which is very exciting. And there is no rate change recommended for this fund. I'm going to pass it back to Randy. So, this is a very important slide that I think most of you will want to know

the details pretty pretty intricate on this with or know this pretty well when you're asked by residents. This is the cumulative rate change impact when you look at solid waste, water, sewer, stormwater, property tax, and electric. So, the assumption is that everybody's receiving these services, and there are assumptions based on the average home value of 600,000, 5,000 gallon a month in water sewer, and around 1,150 kilowatts a month in energy. So, we recognize there are people that will be above this, and there are people that will be below this. This is based on the averages. The cumulative impact, I won't go down every line. I will hit the bottom. If you look from 25-26, the monthly cost for all of those services, property tax included, was just over $450. Uh you're now looking at just around $488 or an increase per month in all of those services and property tax of $34.40. The cumulative number, if you're looking for the year, would be $412.80 for all of these services. And uh we We we wanted to look at different statistics on that and there's probably different ways to chop it, but if you take the median income that was presented at the beginning of the presentation of 144,135, uh and you index this number cumulative for the year, it comes to 0.286% of the median income in uh Apex. Uh so, you can draw different conclusions. We can talk about what the implications of that are, but as you also uh hear from other communities or look at other communities, uh those are some interesting statistics to look at as well uh in terms of uh impact from this. Again, knowing there are people below that median income and above that median income um and have different impacts from what's proposed. Okay, that is the general presentation. We are now going to go into the portfolio section. And first up for the performance and um strategy portfolio, I'm going to invite Sean up to highlight

his um departments. Thank you, Sean. Thank you, Randy. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Uh so, real quick, we'll go over performance and strategy portfolio just to kind of give you an idea of some of the things included in their budget for this year. Uh you can see um this team on the screen with you. Um you've already I see Jessica's already been up here in budget performance. Uh Stacy Galloway is uh leads communications. Uh John Griffin leads our finance. Uh Joanna Helms is over economic development. Uh Carmen McGee leads our human resources. Eric Asseko leads our information technology. And then uh Linda Jones also joins our um joins us with organizational excellence. Um so, getting into what they do, being aware that this group is our internal This is a lot of our internal services. This is a lot of our support. Um and so, when we talk about stability, um I believe that this team provides the core foundation for everything that this organization does. Um it Everything that that our community looks for from the services provided for our departments starts with this team, whether be personnel, whether be financing, whether be the um information that comes out, or whether be the technology needed to put everything in place. So, that was a focus. Again, maintaining that stability for them is what maintains stability for the rest of the organization and our community. Uh with that, uh some of the You can see the budget breakdown here and then the positions that are accounted for in this. Uh just four positions. Two of them are actually current positions. They're moving from part-time to full-time uh as a bump up there. Um and and actually in the finance and IT positions, we'll actually mostly be covered from uh enterprise funds with this as they're heavily uh associated with uh electric or um water and sewer uh billing operations. Uh so, that's where most of that will be from there rather than than general fund. In terms of projects and programs that the group has, uh the focus of this is really about uh establishing or improving efficiency uh and facilitating support services for the rest of the organization. Uh what you see on here, um whether it be the the different tools and modules, they're all for making sure

that uh the other directors and the other departments as well as the uh team members throughout the organization are able to support their teams and are able to provide the services. Um The largest ones I'll point out are are on You see under information technology, the IT infrastructure. Uh this is a lot of upgrades and expansion and modernization for uh everything from our fiber connections to our our wireless connections. That's not just town, but that's also what we, you know, the our residents um partake of. Um This is supporting uh the smart city is an innovation So, this is this might be the parking um uh whether it's different uh parking signage as well as the apps that we have out uh over at Parks and Rec, the different uh usages the use um use data that is put out there now. Uh I'm trying to think of other smart the other smart thing. And there's just a lot of connections there um and making sure that our departments have what they have or have what they need to support the initiatives that you put in forward um for the community. And some of the things that you we've talked about the process and where we had to to pull back from and the the work that the directors did in in helping us get to there. Uh these are a few of the things from um from this team that was uh pulled back um to make sure that we had room for other priorities. There's, you know, everything on here is is a worthwhile initiative. Um they it would help further what we do as an organization in supporting our residents. Um but we also realize that there are other priorities that may take uh precedence. And so, you know, these are the things that were drawn back. Uh So, real quick, I just want to point out the workplace safety initiative. That doesn't mean we don't do workplace safety. We do plenty of workplace safety. These are This was looking at doing an additional certification, an additional um uh uh potential vendor our support services coming in and and offering above and beyond what what is required or necessary. Um You can see on our budget performance, that's actually more on our sustainability initiatives come out of that office on the performance side. Um that's whether be the solar initiative or our electric vehicle infrastructure.

Um some of that had your cost there. Um and then every You can You can see the others in They're self-explanatory. Um And with that, yeah, I think we'll turn it over to our colleague. Would everyone from Sean's portfolios please stand up?

[applause]

All right, next we're going to go to development and operations portfolio and I'm going to ask Marty Stone to come up. He's going to do the runway. Need walk-up songs.

[laughter]

Make sure All right, good afternoon. So, development and operations. We plan, we build, inspect, and maintain infrastructure. So, there's four departments. There's actually six departments. Four are in the general fund and two are enterprise funds. And then there's two other positions that are within my portfolio. And one of them is the capital projects manager, which is listed here. But we also have the special projects manager, which is also under this portfolio. That's the position that was created to support Big Branch and all the development that's going on in Big Branch. Um The capital project manager, obviously, he helps all the departments with any any facility uh construction to make sure that our goals and visions are met. So, if you look at um the portfolio, what makes it a little bit different, they are general fund departments and there are enterprise um departments here. So, if you look at the general fund's made up of four departments here, building inspections, then we have planning. Well, planning is current planning, long-range planning, and uh conditional zoning officers. Then we have public works. That's made up of facilities, fleet, solid waste, and streets. Then you have transportation and infrastructure development. That's made up of engineering, development services,

infrastructure inspections, and real estate. And I point all this out because if I don't call these people out, you kind of get lost in where we're at, right? There's a lot of things wrapped up in these departments. For electric utilities, that is one of our enterprise funds. It's made up of engineering, operations, and power line four street divisions. Then we have the water resources. And water resources has two enterprise funds. It's water and sewer, which is made up of water distribution, sewer collection, and pump stations, water reclamation facility, and utility engineering. And then we have stormwater. Stormwater has got the engineering side, but it also has They manage our MPDES permit, our erosion control, repairing a buffer programs, and flood plain management. Okay? So, uh you'll see as we go on this So, this this budget we have a very large budget, 136.7 million. Um The general fund makes up 31.8 million of that total and enterprise funds 104.9 million of that. If you look at it, the electric fund looks huge, and it is a large fund, but note that budget is driven in large part by power purchase. So, that makes up a large part of that that total funding. And facilities, fleet, streets, solid waste, all over to the side, that all combined together makes up public works and that's 17.6 kind of it could too build compared to the other departments. Um We're adding four positions this year, two in the general and two in enterprise funds. So, our prioritization this year when looking at how we wanted to do our budgets, it was really based on infrastructure and equipment to ensure stability. The four positions that are being added are a crew supervisor in electric, a facilities project specialist in facilities, an engineering plan reviewer in transportation, and electronics technician in water resources. And they're all being driven by workload for those positions.

Looking at projects and programs, uh this is just a few of this is about $5 million worth of them kind of highlight that are in within the general fund. One that I'd like to point to that is is is special to me and you go it's kind of a small one, but it's the public works operations water resources operations office renovation. It's $45,000. You go, "Well, that's not very big." Well, it's also that's a joint project that water resources also taking part in it they also operations is in that building and they've got money in that project as well. But that is a project to go and renovate the existing break room kitchen area at that facility. It's not very well used. If um so we can go in and we want to renovate the kitchen area, update it, make it something that they can be proud of and want to be in and then we're going to take some of the seating area that's not no longer used the way it used to be and we're going to kind of turn it into some work stations and then create some bar stool areas for them to sit. So it will still have the function of the break room but it adds some work space but more than anything it'll give them something to be proud of cuz that facility uh probably got to be pushing 25-30 years old maybe and that kitchen has never been upgraded. If you you know the counter tops are literally the formica is worn through down to the wood. So it's time to do something. So I'm excited about that project for them. Um we are for the transportation we're doing crosswalk beacon upgrades. We're doing four this year. You'll see that in the unfunded effort. There's three in that they're unfunded but we're doing four. Uh division zero stuff is 80,000. That's just typical expenses we see in any one given year when we have safety issues come up. We always want to have some funds available to take care of a unknown safety issue today that may become apparent during the year. For solid waste we are replacing one of two vac trucks. Um those trucks go through a lot of abuse uh and they're on the roads every day. Um if you notice if you've ever like

taken your lawn mower and taken the blades off and looked at what they look like after they've run through some rocks or sand, imagine what the you know these vac trucks take a beating on the blades and all the equipment right because all the debris it picks up in the street cuz even though it's not a sweep truck, it kind of forms the same function as sweeping the street sometimes when it pulls that dirt up. So it's kind of rough on them. We've got a couple of those that need replacing. We're getting one of those this year. We're getting two automated side loaders. That is the first in an effort that we'll need two more that we will have in the budget next year but that is part of the effort to move toward our containerization by July of 2028. 2028 cuz you go why in the world are we doing it now? It takes few years to get these trucks in. So that's just a first part. This HVAC system replacement you'll see that number under solid waste. You see it under streets and you go what's going on? It's cuz streets why they have a vac. Well that's really part of the HVAC replacement in the public works water resources operations building. So there's also So there's 95,000 here. There's also 95,000 in in water resources budget to replace the HVAC in that in that building. You'll see $50,000 here is for the yard waste resident engagement. That is just getting out there to community about the changes that we're looking at in yard waste and that's just for communication piece. Planning we have plant the peak. That's That's our tree program that we have ongoing that's a very very popular as you you're all aware of. The 1.57 million on the transit that that's our full transit. That's the whole number for our transit piece, right? And that's carry door-to-door. That's Sunday service. That's everything included. Um and I think we have some new services about to start up there um soon this year. Um annual street uh improvements the 1.35 that is our annual resurfacing street preservation that we we um do every year based on the prioritization studies that we do to ensure that we keep our roads up. So

unfunded opportunities as I said we we're we had we wanted to replace two leaf trucks. We're only doing one. Uh we have a rear loader that we're not adding on. Um so what does that mean if we're not adding a rear loader? It means we're still using our chipper shredder to collect and so you know the same way we have. Um We have a um one of the things I would like to point out under the vehicle and equipment replacement under fleet. Um we we have these really cool heavy lift system, right? That picks up that pick up fire trucks if you will. There's like I think there's maybe there's at least four maybe six of them. They roll around on their own wheels and they talk to one another and you push your button and it they all work together to lift up a truck. That's how you can't get a car lift to pick up a fire truck, right? We are still using our old ones. We are you know one of this one of the things that we wanted to do this year is replace a but that did not get funded. We're still using the ones we have. So that's just I pointed out you know we're going to we're still going to be safe but that's one of the things that we know that we want to do in the future is you know as part of this whole thing of replacing stuff that's worn out. Well we you know all these things wear out over time and we'll we'll get we'll limp along with what we have in some cases and we're fine but we'll eventually need to get to that. Uh the facility maintenance mechanic we've taken that off but hopefully with all the replacement of vehicles this year that the maintenance requirement will go down and we won't need another mechanic maybe. Uh the building code official that was not needed because as you recall that was the NC Children's Hospital. All the facilities associated with the Children's Hospital will be inspected by the state. So where we thought we were going to need additional inspection, we will not need that at this time. Um streets uh we have a signal and camera technicians. Our hope there was to be able to work on our own beacons. When when a crosswalk goes out we get a call or we get an email and we go but and we have to go out to a vendor. And there's not very many people doing

that type work and and so the most of time the delay in getting those things fixed or us waiting on the vendor. So so the the the downside of not us not having that position, we will have to continue to count on a vendor. Um that it can be done just know that there may be some delays. It may not be as proactive as we would want to be if we had our own position but that's okay. Um I would like to point out under planning that should say mobility solution study because the S-Line mobility hub design is actually something that we take an out of our budget because and I apologize I just saw this while ago. So this this is this is on me not on them for not seeing it sooner. Um but the S-Line mobility hub is actually we believe it to be 100% funded by a grant. So it's it's not out but what this is is the mobility solution study which is $400,000. We have to fund it up front. There's a potential $65,000 grant we could get. So if we So so So if you want to know the danger of not funding this, there's a potential we could lose out on $65,000 but there's no guarantee that we get the grant either, right? So we have to put the money up front first. Uh moving to 120 on the on the rail location, there's there's no implications for removing that this time. That's not a problem. And again the crosswalk beacons there's just three delayed. We can do those next year. We don't feel like that's a problem. And vision zero Beaver Creek Commons that project is designed. Um it's just we can delay it a year. It won't change the design. They're all on town facilities. We're just going to wait a year before we actually ask for the funds to fund that at this time. But that's striping and some other safety improvements crossings and whatnot on Beaver Creek Commons. So on the uh enterprise side, projects that we're

looking at doing, some key things water resources. So there's the break room reutilization. That's the same one I was referring to a while ago. The HVAC is the same as what we referred to a while ago. Water quality remote analyzers, those are where we put remote analyzers out in our system where we receive water from Cary so that we can basically see while sitting in the office what our water quality is coming into our system so we can ensure that the water quality that we're getting is good. And what the real importance of that is is if if Cary has an issue on their side, something happens with a contractor whatever else, then we can and they and they have a boiled water notice or anything that may be coming in their system, if we can show that the water coming into our system at the point of delivery is good, we would not be captured under that same same issue if that if that makes sense. And that originated from a probably an incident maybe five years ago. So we've been trying you know we've got some of these annuals now. We've got additional places where we're getting water and we'd like to be able to monitor that as well. Um so we have a UV system replacement at water reclamation facility. I'd like to point that out. We have a very happy crawdad that I've spoken about before that lives over there. We want to make sure the water quality that we're discharging stays good. The reason it stays so good is it goes through UV disinfection before it's discharged. That UV system is outdated. We have it's partially funded already. It needs another million and a half to fully fund it for us to be able to move forward and get that replacement done. SCADA system upgrades is just is for our sewer and pump stations so that we can hopefully monitor through that more closely and not have to roll a truck to maybe go see what's wrong if we get an alarm. We can see it remotely and maybe reset it if it's something that we don't need to actually roll a truck to go see. The water line gaps uh that's just key there is like So a lot of our development is done by development, right? When they put in infrastructure but there's sometimes a gap between point A and point B that there's no development going on and the town will

identify those projects and go in and fill that gap and that improves circulation, water quality and redundancy. So this project picks up a couple of those. Street sweeping is part of our storm water permit regulations. You look at Seagrove dam repairs, that is due to muskrat damage. Um muskrats get in the dam, they make the dam weaken, that is a dam safety dam. So, they um that's that's an organization, not not language bad here. So, uh so

[laughter]

So, so um that's a repair of that dam to get it in compliance with with the state permit. And the the crossing stream stabilization, that's another really cool project, but where where where we're improving the stream, stabilizing the stream, which will prevent erosion at the same time as protecting our infrastructure. This particular stream is near our our sewer outfall because where our sewers are normally near a creek and if the creek start moving, it starts getting near your your your sewer, right? So, you you stabilize it. Protects your infrastructure, but also prevents erosion and sediment from going downstream, so that's a cool project and we're managing that and doing that um project this year or we're starting it this year, it'll be finished next year. Um electric, again, with a strong focus on infrastructure with substation and distribution of capital and maintenance and equipment highly prioritized. Um they got one position, but you'll see that they're looking to getting a lot of new vehicles, a lot of new replacement vehicles. Um you know, we have a lot of old bucket trucks and whatnot that just need to updating and they're expensive. Question of the day is what is a digger Derrick? Jeez. Huh? It's a pole truck, I hope. Pole truck?

[laughter]

And it's kind of hard to be a utility without a pole truck, right? And you can't just go rent one of those. So, if you have a accident, you know, someone hit the pole in the middle of the night,

you got to replace it, you can't go rent it, you got to have it. So, that's just some of the piece of equipment that we need to replace. The one we have is is fairly old. System expansion is for almost 4.6 million, that's just our normal expansion, that is the normal development that we have going on, that's approximately that's slightly I think our number last year may have been 4.3 ish million on that, so that's just a number that we see every year. The new number you see this year is the ready expansion, 2.5 million. Just let that sink in a minute because that's that's huge increase. Like we we're still got 4. almost 6 million of expansion of what we're doing every day and we're going to add 2.5 for it. You can do the math, I don't know, but that's more than a 33% increase, right? Or whatever, that's um that's more than half, actually. Uh that's a lot. It's not quite half, but whatever the number is. No, I used to be an engineer. Uh So, a lot of work. Um then you see the the substations at at East Williams and Green Level, we will actually be changing the Green Level substation to Jenks Road to to kind of quit the confusion cuz that would actually be on Jenks and as opposed to us in the Green Level area, but it's going to be on Jenks Road. We have already ordered the transformers for those. One's an upgraded East Williams, the Jenks or Green Level substation is a brand new station. That will be our fourth substation, that's going to offer all kind of redundancy for us. It's going to be a great thing because our system is getting loaded up and that allows us to to lessen the load on our feeders. So, it's a real good thing. And our unfunded opportunities um are all just people, right? So, and that and that's how I say just people, but I said we had a focus on equipment and infrastructure for this year. Um you'll see that um so, each one of these kind of lead to us maybe being not quite as um timely as we want to be, maybe a delay in response. Maybe a little bit less proactive. For example, stormwater compliance

specialist, one of the things that we'll miss out on by not having that position, if we may not be able to do as much public outreach and education as we had done in the past. I mean, we will still do what we can, but if there's a ongoing development issue over here, that's going to take priority over an education piece maybe at a kindergarten or a first grade class just because of the nature it has to, right? Um but other than that, we feel like we are in very good shape. I think the groups did a a fantastic job on putting their budgets together. Um everybody made sacrifices. It wasn't one place. Um I will say that all directors, when they ask for stuff, they're doing it from the sole perspective of doing better for the town. It's not for any other reason and that's a really cool thing about working with this group. So, thank you. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it.

[clears throat]

Marty's portfolio, stand up, please.

[applause]

All right, we're going to go to our final portfolio, so our community and safety and I'm going to ask Demetria John to come up and present on her departments. Not sure why I got to go behind Marty, but Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Um I will be walking through the community and safety portfolio um highlighting our personnel, capital and operational uh recommendations. Um this portfolio includes police led by Ryan Johansson, fire led by Tim Herman and parks, recreation and cultural resources led by Craig Setzer and um community development and neighborhood connections led by Marla Newman who's not here today. Um the purpose statements that you see uh represent the daily commitment of the community and

safety. Um together these services ensures Apex is safe, welcoming and um connected. Under this um

[clears throat]

slide, uh the community and safety budget uh total uh total 73.7 million. Um the recommendations in the new budget to maintain service levels as the town continues to grow. Uh we have a total of 12 positions. Um under [clears throat] fire, one fire inspector, um police, eight positions total and just so you know, initially um as you recall, Chief Johansson completed an assessment uh during the public um safety uh work session. He presented his assessment. Uh we had agreed that he would do an assessment um over the year and present those recommendations in the uh work session. Um when we started out this budget process initially, I I think we had came up with uh the 19 positions and so recommended in this budget right now um is the eight positions. Six officers, uh one corporal and um as Randy mentioned, uh special ops, one special ops uh lieutenant. And in parks, um three recommended positions um in the area of program and maintenance support. So, the key takeaway here is our focus is balancing service expectations with responsible staffing levels. In terms of the programs and uh projects, um we have a total of 5.83 million um um recommended. Um so, I'll just kind of go through on the capital side, these are the long-term investments that supports um public both safety and quality of life. Under parks, um I'll uh mention the town campus stage which is one of the 12 projects uh to be funded by Wake uh County's

hospitality tax uh funding. Um the ladder truck replacement, I know we've had conversations about that, but I wanted to highlight um this truck has been um for the past 5 years, repair costs have been an annual of 200,000 um per year totaling 1 million to date. Initially, um this truck was scheduled for replacement back in 2021. Today, the cost of this new ladder truck is 2.3 million and of course, nationally, the cost of uh new fire trucks, the increase has gone up. Um the um decisions are about long-term sustainability, not just the immediate needs. On the operation side, uh for parks, um we as Randy mentioned about um the athletic program expansion, senior center program expansions. Um we also have um one of the things that's near and dear to me, um enhancing our community engagement efforts. Um one of the things that in community development and neighborhood connections, um launching an Apex the Apex coordination team which is internally um an outreach event. Um this event is um will give residents an opportunity to learn more about the local government. It also humanizes what we do and not just outreach um where it's one one-sided, but also um back and forth, you know, um engaging with the community. Sorry about that. Um as far as um the community engagement mailers, just want to mention um this is also um um an opportunity to market the community engagement divisions um programs, interactive uh programs, resources and things like that. So, the goal here is to send out mailers across

the year uh up to maybe four times and it will reach 40 to 41,000 households. And this will give them an opportunity to learn more about uh some of these programs like COM University, the lunch series know before. So I hope if funded this is something that we will be able to step into. I also want to mention Randy brought up the replacement vehicles and then brought up the ladder truck. I thought it was something else I wanted to highlight that Randy didn't but I think I covered it all. As far as the unfunded opportunities this was very painful for the portfolio as it was across the departments. There are 7.6 million in additional needs that are not funded in this recommendation. So there are budget realities and trade-offs and so there are quite a few things on here. I want to highlight one in particular under parks kids town playground. This is one I know since I've been here in the three years that I've seen show up in the unfunded opportunities and this is the 26 year old lumber built playground. I know the funding request started back in fiscal year 22 and 23 as a fiscal year 2024 2025. I think we were the design was funded but we have not funded anymore than that. So I I would hope that if we have any trade-offs or buybacks kids town would be highly considered. The additional police staffing and specialty units. I wanted to highlight the balance of those positions as I mentioned. Um 19 positions were

requested as you can see the eight police officers a sergeant task force officer and then we have the cart mental health clinician and officer. That's also another one

[music]

that has also showed up uh more than once and then the second corporal that was requested. Another item that continues to show up is the rescue rescue retrieval van and armor truck

that continues to show up and I know we will probably have some additional questions from you all as we go through this process and um let's see the PD headquarters development study. This is something that chief spoke about in the work session. I know that he and some of his team went to an ICP um workshop where they got a chance to spend time learning about developing police facilities. So this was also something that he had done when after the work session and so if this is something that is funded this may take a year this may take more than a year to even go through this study. So it's not something that may happen around the corner but for you all to consider to go in and let them you know do an exploratory study about the facility. These are the valid needs but I know that as you consider these items here um just like all the other portfolios it's very painful to not be able to get everything that you want but everything that they asked for is for the benefit of the town and the residents. And that's it. Thank you. All right, I'm asked the same Demetria's portfolio if you'd stand up please. ALL RIGHT.

[applause]

BLESS YOU SIR. SO THANK YOU ALL FOR your presentations. The recap focusing on stability maintaining our strong investment in public safety our investment and infrastructure for the community and then also our utilities and our long-term investment and plan to bring those utilities in particular our electric fund up to where we should be with our cash on hand. Did Did we have some tough decisions? We did and you've seen those and some of those things hurt on the on the unfunded list but it was it was about a balancing of priorities. We're glad now that we can pass that off to you to balance those priorities further. We've put forward what we believe is a very robust budget that still accomplishes a lot of the goals that have been put forward based on our strategic plan based on the retreats and work sessions that we've had with you. It's a budget that we put forward for the community for the stability of our community for the stability of our workforce for the stability of our infrastructure. A commitment to bring the stability like I said to our electric fund. All of this comes together for the stability of our residents. So with that I'm going to touch briefly on next steps and then I will turn it over to you. So next we have two committee meetings that are established and on the calendar with the finance committee April 23rd which will have a focus on the general fund and then April 30th another finance committee which will focus on the utility funds. Next would be the council workshop on May 8th which would be every all inclusive all funds. Then we have one tentatively we'll see how the 8th goes if you all decide you would like a second we have one put on the calendar for June 2nd. Again that would be kind of all all items included. And then public hearing and adoption. So we did it for this year and I'm hopeful we can try it again for this year for

coming up for the proposed. May 28th is when we've scheduled public hearing and budget adoption. That gives us some time to process get things ready to go for July 1. We do have as a backup plan if you choose not to adopt on May 28th we have put June 9th as the backup adoption date and of course we can talk if that doesn't work you can always look at special dates but just know the closer we get to July 1st the the smiles turn to a little nervous smiles in this room and our budget staff gets a little more stressed the closer we get to July 1st if we don't have an adoption. So we we're hopeful we can provide you the information and details through the committee meetings workshops one-on-one discussions so that we can head into a an adoption on May 28th. With that we do appreciate your time today and I'll turn it back to you mayor. All right. Thank you Mr. Bossburg job well done by everyone. I just want to say this again I think I mentioned this last year this is the second year I think we've had this structure of the presentations and it's really really helpful to have this information going into the book that we have to tackle but thank you to everyone who put in the time it was well well done well received. We got some work to do of course a lot of tough decisions and I hate it for you guys that you had to do that but we got all the solutions up here right? Maybe not but [laughter] anyway They may not be popular solutions.

Okay yeah exactly. But it's great we have community members in the room as well to observe the professionalism and the passion that we have with the town of Apex. So I'll turn it over to Mayor Pro Tem now for comments and then we'll go down the line. And thank you too Mr. Coleman for for your work as well. Yeah thank you mayor. I'll you know start again by thanking you know Randy and the budget staff for all the work you did and the the process very impressive the way you guys came together and and put this budget. Obviously it's a very challenging year like we say that every year. I have a lot to digest. I'm

fortunate enough to be on the the budget committee so I'll reserve most of my comments till I have a chance to go through the book and and start digging in next Thursday but you know thank you so much for the work and the presentation and you know move forward and see what happens. Okay well I want to also thank the staff for this. I've you know this this process is a a rigorous one and one that we've been pushing for for years so I'm really happy that that that is there. And the reason why I really like it is it passes the real I guess fun part to all of you who put in the work. I've heard and talked to many members of the community and they're like well why are you letting the staff kind of tell you how much money they need? Aren't they going to come up with you know just these big numbers and I said no. Essentially what we've done is well I'm going to frame it in one of two ways. It's either hey which arm do you want to have cut off or for those of you have a certain generation and a certain era go out and get the switch. Your own switch. So we recognize how difficult this process is but going through that process ultimately gives us a really good position and we can see the real pain. 57 in terms of an actual need in terms of people and then coming down to a number under 20 is is real evidence that you guys took this entire situation seriously and looking at all the other capital expenses that are there. I'll tell you that you know because of that process you guys give us a lot of good good pieces of information. I do think it's just the start of the process. I know we're looking for more public input so what you know we'll encourage members of the of the community to dig into this binder along with us and we'll be looking for ways of getting input and getting their thoughts on how to move forward. Um

as a point just to kind of close out, I'll tell you how I look at the budget. Um the thing that I'm going to be looking at is balancing this issue in the sense of looking at how much money we're going to need to ask our residents. I'm going to be thinking of that person who has the fixed income, the person who doesn't have the ability to make payments. Um you know, I spent a lot of time talking with one particular resident. Won't mention her name, but you know, last winter she didn't turn on her heat because she's on a fixed income. She doesn't have a car. She relies on our great transportation system, which is free. Um in the summertime, she doesn't turn on the air conditioning because she's that focused on making sure that she can maintain a budget. That's the person in my mind that I'm trying to make sure we don't have an impact on because that to me is where we have to make sure we're focusing on the least of us. And I know from talking to each and every one of you, that was a focus of all of you as well when you gave us this proposal. The other thing that's going to be important to me and the other area that I'm going to be looking at this through the lens of is really through a lens of public safety. And the reason why I'm going to look at this through a lens of public safety is um history has taught us that in times of economic uncertainty, unfortunately, uh we're not the kindest to each other. Um I think that in order for us to maintain uh the level of services that we provide, but the level of community that we deserve, making sure that we are turning our attention and focusing, at least in my eyes, focusing on a budget with a lens towards how do we ensure that public safety, the least of us who cannot provide are taken care of, but most importantly, making sure that we are maintaining the quality of life that we have what that we've earned here. That's an important thing. So, those are the two big lenses that I'm going to be using as I'm looking at the budget and figuring out where we're making our

necessary cuts and what things do we need to take a look at in that unfunded list that may need to be slid over. But, I tell you that just so you have an idea of kind of where my mind is at in my analysis, but I do want to say the analysis part will be a lot easier due to the work of all of you in this room. So, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for doing the hard work. And um I really appreciate the work that you've done to the assistant town managers that that were leading their portfolios. Thank you for your hard work because I know those were not easy conversations that you were having with the folks who work for you. And to Manager Vallsburg, thank you for following through on the on on the thing that we've asked from years, which is come up with a project a budget process that makes sense, and you did that. So, I appreciate the hard work that you've done, and we'll do everything we can to make sure that the hard work that you guys have done won't be in vain. Thank you, Council. Councilmember Reese. Um we

[clears throat]

I recently learned a phrase from uh Wake County Commission Chair Don uh Mile that he said uh the five Bs. Be brief, brother. Be brief. So, I'm going to be as short as I can um as I'm addressing my comments. I'm going to be absorbing this. I've been looking forward to receiving this. Um we're attempting to thread a needle, and so I'm incredibly grateful um to our town manager, to our assistant town managers, to all of our directors, to all of our staff, um to the folks who are uh the residents who are here, the residents watching online. Thank you for carving out time out of your day uh to be involved in your town decision-making. Um I appreciate the references the consistent references to stability, and

I think that threading that needle is going to be stability while also ensuring that we're being proactive as we see supply chains um being tightened and things becoming a bit more unstable in that regard. Uh but I do want to also echo that uh the comments from Councilmember Gray. Um the resident I'm going to have in mind is going to be that person who is, you know, looking at a tight family budget. Um they're already facing strain when it comes to the grocery prices, gas prices. Go try to buy a car right now, and it's I mean, a used car. Go try to buy something where I'm just trying to get from point A to point B, and you're already in the mid-20s and 30s at minimum. Um So, those are the folks I'll be thinking about as we make tough decisions. And thank you so much for your hard work assembling this. Let's get to work. Thank you, sir. Councilwoman Moore.

I'll get it really short.

[laughter]

Uh first, I want to thank everyone, Randy, uh Deputy Manager, and all department uh directors. It's a it's not easy job. You guys put everything together. It's a lot of information to process. Um I promise I'll read it through uh carefully and try to make responsible and balanced decision. That's all. Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Zigman. Just want to point out that Councilmember Reese has an interesting way of being brief.

[laughter]

Uh support from this side of the table. Clock's Clock's ticking, Councilmember.

Anything they said.

Um I support. Um The only other addition I have, you know, in addition to all the thank yous and whatever, um is this is by far the most important piece of legislation that we as a council, you know, get to pass every single year. Um you know, we see these chambers being filled, you know, with, you know, what is effectively routine requests like throughout the year. But this like a budget really shows our priorities and then, you know, gives us an opportunity to put our money where our mouth is, almost quite literally. Um and so uh this is, you know, probably the the one that I've read about the most every single year. Um it's a lot of a lot of work that goes in it, but also a lot of work uh to digest it and make sure that, you know, we we come up with the right the right trade-offs. And so, um the work that staff has done uh makes it a little bit easier, right? A lot of work and and thought and trade-offs have already gone gone into this process. Now, it's our turn. Um looking forward to it. Um again, this is uh by far the most important vote that we get to make every make every year. And um we're off to the races. Thank you very much. All right. Very well. Okay. I mean, it's good. You guys are short. You promised. [laughter] I didn't promise to be short. And we're 30 minutes ahead.

Yeah, can we someone at least give us credit because we're doing a budget not going to talk about the guys on Jones Street?

[laughter]

I do want to close by saying um to Assistant Town Manager Demetrius John and um Deputy Town Manager Shawn Purvis and of course Mr. Stone and Mr. Vallsburg, you guys got a bright future in in video movies. How much did that cost?

[laughter]

It is a fair question. Yeah. All right. Any other business?

Reference to the budget.

[clears throat]

All right. Hearing none. Motion to adjourn. Thank you all so much. Happy reading. Thank you.

Mhm.