Minutes 03/22/2021 - Laserfiche WebLink

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March 22, 2021 (For Informational Purposes Only) Virtual Presentation of the Proposed 2021-2022 Budget: Opening Statement: To the Honorable Mayor Shannon Glover, Vice Mayor DeAndre Barnes, Members of City Council, City Employees, and Citizens of Portsmouth: We are pleased to present this Proposed FY 2022 Operating Budget and FY 2022-26 Capital Improvement Plan. It reflects a fiscally responsible and responsive document that considers the current financial realities and community needs. The budget development team considered the complexity of needs for the community, including services and infrastructure. At the top of our priorities for FY2022 was maintaining the provision of core services and stabilizing the workforce; this includes the avoidance of adverse impacts of employee furloughs as much as possible while investing in priority areas such as:  Funding the City’s legacy pension plans  Proposed increase in annual allocations to Portsmouth Public Schools  Revitalizing the Community  Investing in infrastructure  Employee wage increases for our dedicated and hard-working employees, especially in the current difficult recruiting environment The nation has certainly felt the human and economic impacts of the Coronavirus pandemic known as “COVID-19”, which has caused a recession from which global economies are only expected to begin to recover during late 2022. The implication is that most economies will not return to their previous performance, depending on the evolution of the monetary, fiscal, and regulatory policies implemented by Federal and State governments. On March 27, 2020, in response to the need to stabilize budgets and to ensure localities had there sources necessary to battle the virus, and to provide the services that citizens could rely upon, the Federal government adopted the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act known as the (“CARES Act”). The funds from the CARES Act could not be used to fill local government revenue shortfalls or revenue replacement; however, the statute allowed reasonably “necessary” incurred unbudgeted expenditures directly related to the effects of the pandemic, emergency services and providing economic support to those suffering from employment and business interruptions due to COVID-19 closures. This funding has assisted the city in meeting its financial needs for FY 20 and thus far in FY 2021. “Hope is not blind optimism. It's not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It's not sitting on the sidelines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it. Hope is the belief that destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by the men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.” In the development of the proposed budget, difficult choices were made that reduced the general fund proposed budget by $(1,328,313) (0.52% decrease) from the Adopted FY2021 budget. The general fund recommended budget for FY 2022 is $252,629,328. Of the FY2022 proposed general fund budget, 23.9% allocated to the school's transfer of $58,834,014. The total proposed budget including CIP is $702,824,055.