Anchorage Assembly: Budget and Finance Committee-of-the-Whole Meeting

I call this meeting to order. So it is 10:05. We are noticed from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM. This is the Assembly Budget and Finance Committee of the Whole. We do not quite have the whole right now, but we will probably have some more members soon.

And then I'll just note, we did shorten the time of this committee in order to accommodate a work session that we will do shortly after this. So essentially what we'll do is end this meeting, depending on the timing, and then probably move right into that confirmation hearing. Just for timing warnings, and then we'll have another committee after that. So, uh, so let's go around the room for introductions and I'll go to the phone. Sydney Scout, Anna Brawley, and on the phone we have Mr. Martinez.

Yes, Chair, thank you. Okay, and not joined by my other members at this point, but we also have Assembly Council Donald Handel is here on the phone. Sorry. Oh, thank you. Uh, sorry, we'll get your nameplate up there.

Uh, any other members on the phone?

Okay, and I'll announce folks as they come in. So we're also joined by Assembly Council members, the administration, Clerk's Office, and a couple members of the public. And we will move into our reports. So I will call up our Budget Advisory Commission Chair, Mr. Mills.

And then as he's coming up, also note the, the main topics for today are really moving through our usual reports, and then we will get into a presentation from our budget analyst. So with that, I will turn to Mr. Mills to give a report. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. We had a good meeting last week.

We got a presentation from OMB on the proposed budget. I had the pleasure of participating in the District 1 budget town hall Tuesday evening with Member Scout and Vice Chair Voland. I think that went very well. The Budget Advisory Commission is looking at a budget resolution that we hope to adopt at our November regular meeting. I'll keep it brief.

Happy to take any questions. Okay, questions from members?

I don't see any from other members. I do have one, so, uh, and just kind of a brief conversation. So I know the Budget Advisory Commission would like to be involved in our the budget process. So obviously it sounds like you all are doing that, um, and then additionally fiscal work. So I wanted to just briefly say in this committee as well, uh, we are holding a Fiscal Futures Summit on Friday, October 30th.

I know that's been discussed from, uh, BAC, so, uh, just seeing if there's any additional kind of thoughts, or I know some members have signed up to, to be, uh, participating in that, which is great, but if you have any other things you'd like to add, please do so. Yeah, thank you. I'm looking forward to attending that event on the 30th. I know that at least one of our other members is planning to attend. Our other members is planning to attend.

We were asked if we would be willing to volunteer to help coordinate that, and I think that myself and the one other member are on board for that. So that should be a good time. And then you and I had started a discussion about a work session, and I look forward to working with you on that if that moves forward. Okay, yeah, thank you. So ongoing conversation.

But yeah, I think certainly welcome participation and coordination there, and I know that was part of your resolution that you all passed, so wanting to make sure we continue to follow up on that and work together. So thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Okay, I don't see any other further questions, so thank you for being here. You're welcome to stick around, and thank you for your service.

Please pass that along to the rest of the board. So next we will move on to our MOA Trust Fund. So I'll invite Mr. Liu to come up and give a presentation—. Or not presentation, just give an update. Thank you.

I didn't want to oversell expectations. Please go ahead. Good morning. Kevin Liu, Investment Director of MOA Trust. We had a pretty interesting month of September.

The market had a mixed performance driven by the Federal Reserve rate hike and the high Treasury yields. On September 16th, the Federal Open Market Committee raised the rate by a quarter percent to a new range of 3.75 to 4%. This creates a higher borrowing cost and lower bond prices, which impact our fixed income portfolios more than the equity portfolios. That said, as of September 30th, the market value of the trust is $507 million. The monthly return is down by 1.5% from the previous month, and the year-to-date remains at a positive 6.5%.

This concludes my reports. Happy to answer any questions.

Any questions from members? Let me check real quick on the phone.

Um, don't see any right now. I guess the one question I have is, um, I know you're The fund itself is not a core part of our kind of annual budget process. It's, it's on its own. But just do you have any, I guess, thoughts for kind of changes you might be making in 2027? And we know there's a lot of volatility right now.

We, we are considering different dividend payout rates, and currently we are working on the dividend spending policy studies. At the moment. So hopefully we'll have something come up by the end of the year. Okay, thank you. Yeah, and just an open invitation if you or the board members want to give a more fulsome presentation about the, the fund or changes you're making, and we're always happy to accommodate that in this committee.

So thank you. Okay, thank you. And I'll note we were joined in the room by Member Park just a minute ago. And with no further questions, then thank you for your report.

Okay, and then next we will call up, and we have our summary report on the table as well. So we'll all bring up Mr. Crawford, currently our acting treasurer, for the revenue report. So please proceed. Good morning. Loren Crawford, acting treasurer.

Before you have the revenue summary highlights, no surprises really here. We're tracking right where we're forecasting it. With a little bit of variance, but nothing that's to be worried about in any way. So personal property tax has been billed. It will— it's not in our accounting system right now, but it's looking to be around $34 million or so.

So if you have any questions, please let me know. OK, questions from members. Check online.

I have a couple. I don't see any from other members at this point. On the personal property tax, I'm curious. So that is something that we changed, basically raised the exemption on, knowing that that would forego some revenue, but mostly for those very small businesses. I'm curious because I see the actuals were $33 million.

The budget this year is about $30-something, and then the note is obviously we'll get most of that later in the year. But I'm just wondering, you know, do we have a better picture essentially of how much revenue we're giving up with that exemption? Is that kind of stabilized at this point, or like, is $30 million about what we would expect given that change? Well, at this point we're not expecting $30 million. We just billed it.

It looks like the bills went out for about $32 million, and $3.7 million have been adjustments throughout the year that have caused increased tax from previous years. So it looks like we're going to be above that target of our budget. So, okay, so essentially the exemption didn't necessarily result in a huge decrease is what I'm hearing, correct? Okay, thank you. Also note we were joined just now by Member Gerger on the phone.

And then as I'm scanning through— yeah, Miss Member Scout, go ahead. Thanks. I'm also sorry, I think one thing we've heard about in the past, and I'd love to better understand where we're at now, alcohol and marijuana taxes. It looks like alcohol is at 51.8%. Yes.

Year to date. So is that behind? So we're not outside of the 20%. In fact, we're about 2% above what we expected at this time of the year. Again, that's based on variance.

And there's kind of a delay, so these are always 2 months behind. And so it's right where we're tracking. So I would expect it maybe to be, it might be slightly higher than budget. But it might also be slightly lower than the budget at this point too, 'cause we still have quite a bit of uncertainty. And is the marijuana tax higher than, if we're at 75% now, are we going to go over?

Yeah, so that's an interesting case of a, So there's multiple accounts that are within this. One of the accounts is 408380, which is our prior year expense recovery. In this case, there was a $400,000 adjustment— well, that's not an adjustment, but a prior year expense recovery for 2025 and 2026 that was expensed in March of this year, which caused this to be slightly elevated. $400,000 Is large for a $5 million tax revenue, is elevating that. It's not actually new revenue.

It's kind of a rollover. So, yeah, thank you. Yeah, okay. And that did me on the marijuana. I was curious, so I've done more work historically on alcohol tax, so I know there's definitely a seasonality to it.

You can imagine the holidays. Summer tourist season. And then my, my rough speculation would be relatively more visitors are buying alcohol than buying marijuana. Not 100%, but I think— but I'm curious, kind of, uh, and sorry, I'll just note also, uh, Member Voland, or Vice Chair Voland, just joined us in the room at 10:15. So my question is, based on the historical data and the trends, how much is marijuana tax seasonal relative to alcohol tax?

You know, are they following the same patterns? Are they different? It's just an interesting kind of thing to think about. So generally, year to year, it varies. So we're seeing kind of mixed seasonality.

So actually no real seasonality at all, right? Okay, thank you. Um, okay, any other questions?

Okay, not seeing any. Well, thank you for report, and I know, uh, you'll be sticking around or coming back in a little bit for our next meeting. So with that, we will turn to our next standing report, and that is our budget to actuals for 2025, um, and I believe— or '26, I think, um, the agenda there. And we were joined by our OMB Director, Ms. Brouse, and we have another set of papers for reports. So let's move through that.

Ms. Brouse, when you're ready. Okay, thank you, Chair. The 2026 Budget to Actuals— I almost said 2025 too, Chair— is in front of you. And at the report, we have— it's through September 30th. We run it through the previous month, and at 74.5% through the fiscal year, the municipality is 72% spent on its budget.

You see in the lower right-hand column on page 1 that 72% as opposed to the 74.5%. When you run down the percentage totals in the far right column, we— anything that is over or under a 5% variance, just to sort of poke into that and see if there are any special circumstances happening within departments. These departments throughout the year, as they have sort of run a little high from the beginning because of contractual encumbrances, but the trends are all pretty much the same, but most of the departments are leveling out to their year-end final sort of spend. And we should see that anywhere between 1 to 5%, depending on the department when we get to December. There are not a whole lot of new instances of questions that need to be resolved, but if there are any questions on departments, let me know.

Okay, on page 3, the labor/non-labor report. Again, the labor postings are at 75%, so right about spot-on, and non-labor is at 68%, so we are under underspent on non-labor, but some of that is attributable to some financial transactions that still need to take place and be put into the system, as well as year-end activity that occurs in the last few months of the year. Any questions on labor and non-labor? Questions from members? Just double-checking.

Don't see any right now.

The next page is the over—. Oh yeah, for the record, I had forgotten we are doing an earthquake drill at this moment, so we will let the recording continue. Folks are going to leave the room and we will be back shortly. Thank you.

So folks on the phone, I would imagine we'll be back in about 10 minutes or so. This is not an actual emergency. This is a drill.

Alrighty, we are filing back in. We'll get started in just a minute as a couple more folks walk back in.

Okay, we are waiting for just another minute, um, for the OMB Director to file back in. I know the whole building worth of people is trying to get back in and back to their jobs, so I will get started in another minute. But in the meantime, I will also note, uh, for members, um, especially those who are going to be coming in person today, uh, we have our, uh, FY27 General Operating Budget and Six-Year Fiscal Program binders, the biggest binder of the three. Uh, we have physical copies of those here. Those are also, they've been online since the budget was published, but just a note for members.

And then I think we'll make sure to track who in person, who is here this morning. And then if you aren't here at the moment, then we'll put it in, or someone will put it in your mailbox. So just forgot to noting that's the case. So we are now again joined by Ms. Brouse and everyone else who came in from the parking lot. So I think we were on labor versus non-labor.

I don't believe there was anyone in the queue, but let me double check.

I guess, so just bringing us back to the meeting, I do have one question on this. So the non-labor cost, you mentioned that we're technically underspent, but there's some reasons there. I guess I'm curious kind of what the general findings have been so far in terms of— I know you guys have been taking a close look at non-labor. Is there any other kind of commentary or any specifics that you'd like to pull out here, maybe a couple examples?

To the Chair, I think the easiest example of things like the finance bookings that need to occur that would change the level of spend on the non-labor items, you can see at the bottom of the column the TANZ expense and the convention center. Those are, you know, within categorical sort of financial transactions that that have not occurred yet in SAP, so they show up as not being spent, but we expect them to be spent as budgeted. So that would adjust the total non-labor actuals. There are a couple of other sort of anomalies. There is— PM&E has a— but they have a very low non-labor budget.

And so part of that has to do with a, I think, a misapplied encumbrance that's being cleared up as part of the work the Controller's Office does on an annual basis, just making sure that all of the financial entries are in the right place.

And traditionally, we've talked about the Chief Administrative— because of the venues contracts and the fact that risk management exists as part of the Chief Administrative Office, and those both can run very high depending on the activity.

Okay, thank you. I don't see any further questions, so let's move on to the next page. Overtime— this sort of runs the gamut of zero to a lot depending on what the department activity is. We've talked about overtime a couple of times throughout the year, but we'll talk more about overtime analysis and departmental operations during the budget presentation tomorrow, particularly around around some of the larger overtime departments like police, fire, and transit. There is particular attention being paid to all of their overtime activity and whether or not there are efficiencies to be gained by position changes or any sort of operational adjustments that would decrease the use of overtime.

Okay, a question for Mr. Bowen. Yes, I'm sure we will probably dig into this tomorrow too, so we don't have to answer it all now. But one of the things I'm flagging is the overtime for police, um, and I know some of that— I don't know how much, but I know some of that is going to be the downtown foot patrols. And I know that that has been very, um, I guess valuable and important to the downtown business community. Um, it was flagged for me that maybe the downtown foot patrols are not in the proposed budget Um, so just want to know, like, what's the plan there?

I also know, you know, other districts might be, um, interested in on the ground in, in, in their neighborhoods. But yeah, yeah, and we, and we do have some, some analysis that talks about over time and tipping point within staffing models at APD and, and the idea that the downtown foot patrol was enabled because of the additional funding from the TIPS appropriation, and it was specifically applied on an overtime basis because we don't have enough sworn officers to do regular, regular time foot patrol. So that's one of the layers of the challenge of how we are sort of patching these needs. There was one-time funding available from TIP specifically to do an enhanced downtown foot patrol, but that additional appropriation doesn't exist in 2027. So we either need to find some other revenue source to fund the OT cost associated with that operation.

Could we do a special levy? Through the Chair, I think that's— I mean, that's the service area model, if you will. If there's a service you would like, then you sort of have to pay into the kitty for the service you want. I don't know the legal structure of how that would have to work out because police service area versus the actual downtown district you might be talking about. I don't know if that's within the DID or any— I don't know how we work that out, but that's an option.

Oh, thank you.

Okay, thanks. Any other further questions? Not seeing any, then let's continue. Travel report. Total adjusted budget, $603,000.

$1.2 Million right now spent 16% of the year. So we are underspent on travel by about 13%. Again, this runs all over the place depending on the department that you are in, with the most travel in the highest— in the largest departments. Thanks. And just a quick tech update.

We're having some static, so we'll swap out microphones. Any questions from members there?

Okay, not seeing any, then let's continue. The next report is the alcohol tax. I'm on the wrong page. Alcohol tax budget to actuals. This is slightly different because a lot of these are grants or full appropriations as opposed to operational activities that occur throughout the year.

So 74% spent through the year, but the alcohol tax appropriations are 99% spent.

Spent. Most of these are for homelessness contract providers or grant contracts within the Health Department. Some of the operational line items are running at their appropriate percentages for being 74% through the year, and for the most part, we don't see anything to be concerned about on spend or revenue on the alcohol tax.

Questions for members?

I'm not seeing any.

And the marijuana, same sort of structure with grant activities and some operational line items for municipal staff, but for the most part they are also appropriately spent and should be fine and probably have some fund balance at the end of the year, but that remains to be seen. Okay, any questions from members on that?

Okay, not seeing any, and I know we are— we'll be having another fulsome conversation about the budget tomorrow, so thanks for the reports. I'll just briefly see if there's any updates on positions, FEMA, ARPA. Those are our standing items, of course, and we bring them up if we need to, so just seeing if there's anything there. Through the Chair, I will say that the OEM MCM has been working with the state, particularly on closing out the FEMA earthquake recovery because of the handful of projects that are still open there. And the most recent conversation, I think, resulted in some good transaction and some more reimbursement coming towards the municipality to get closer to being done with the earthquake.

The goal is to have the earthquake and all of our related emergencies closed out by the end of the year. Closed out through the 2027 budget process, uh, entirely. So they will no longer be, uh, a question mark or theoretically require standing reports because the activity will be done and closed out. Okay, thank you. Any questions, members, on that?

Okay, don't see any. And, um, maybe, knock on wood, someday we can take those, or at least that one, off of our list. So getting, getting close. We know there's a reporting timelines and things that we need to work on. So, okay.

So I think that takes us through our standing reports. So next we're going to go— we have one new business item today and we're going to switch gears and have our budget analyst, Ms. Molly Rocher, come up and speak to the work she's been doing and really help members, especially new members, understand the budget amendment process. And the goal here is not to get into the details of the budget, but to make sure everybody's really prepared for are part of the job, which is reviewing the budget, considering amendments, and then moving through those in the process. So Molly's been doing a lot of great work updating our forms. And I'll just also note, we have— I think we might have at least one person for audience participation.

So I will end us at about 10:40.

No, sorry, it is 10:42. And it's just a few minutes before the close of the meeting. So go ahead, Ms. Rochet. Thank you. My name is Molly Rocher.

I'm the Assembly Program and Budget Analyst. Hopefully I—. Working on how close I need to be to microphone. Members, you have a packet in front of you, the Assembly Budget Amendment Guide, which I created with a lot of help. I won't take credit for all of it.

There is a quick typo on there. Your Assembly meeting is not November 18th. I believe it is the 17th. The due date does not change, so just know that that part, the important part, is the same. In this packet there's just some guidance, like I said, and then there's 5 templates.

One of those is your general operating government template that will also be used for alcohol tax and marijuana tax separately, so those will— don't worry about those amendments getting muddled with the general operating government. Again, most important, your draft amendments are due to me on November 4th. So that is a very important deadline. If you don't have all of your details, if you're not quite sure on fund source, you're still scrambling on a couple details, that's fine. Uh, just for purposes of discussion, we want as much information as you have available.

However, you do need to iron out all those details by November 11th so that way we can prep them and have everything to the clerk's office in time for the meeting. Uh, if you don't like the idea of wrestling with Word documents and figuring out which template is best for your process, There is an online form now that will be emailed to you after this meeting. That's the beauty of a Friday afternoon brainstorming meeting with OMB. Good ideas come. So that form is self-explanatory, hopefully.

I've added a lot of detail in there, mostly for my benefit, because this is my first process, and making sure that you guys have all the information. I know there's new members this year, so there's a lot of explanatory text. If you've been through the process before, you can ignore it and— do things how you've always done them. As we work on amendments, the description items, these are just some prompt questions, hopefully to help you start thinking about it. This all doesn't have to be in the written amendment, but just having this information available, kind of something to think through.

The biggest one being how is your budget amendment going to impact services or internal operations? I think that's helpful for the public to know and gets to the intention of your amendment. So also knowing who's going to be responsible. If you have a big, beautiful program that you want to implement, make sure that there are staff and resources and those overhead kind of hidden costs are considered. So hopefully you're working with departments on understanding those impacts.

Again, knowing what success is going to look like, knowing what the goal is, that just helps everyone understand what you're going for. If you want to increase the dinosaur budget because you love dinosaurs and you have a 4-year-old advocate, like I do, and you know, that's fine, you can increase on that level, but if what you're really looking for is the pterodactyl training program, maybe specify that. Try not to use real examples, because obviously I'd be biased in that. So, you know, if it's just at that top level, the director might say, well, actually, brachiosaurus is really what I want to fund, because I see that need. So if you leave it at the high level, that's fine.

If you're saying directors, whatever you need to do with this cut or this increase. But if you really have something specific in mind, that just helps everybody understand and discuss. The other thing is, does this change connect to something else? I've listed some reference materials. I know there's others that I have probably not remembered or didn't find in my research.

You guys do a lot of really good work on researching and creating strategic plans. There was a whole effort, so just referring back to those and using those, you don't have to start from scratch. On what kind of amendments you might be looking for. So you can reference those in your documents or not. I've seen it done in previous amendments that I was looking through.

The nitty-gritty, the funding details. This is extremely important. If you are increasing something, let us know where you found that money. That'd be fantastic to know. If there's a decrease, again, getting to that specifics, getting to your intention for the budget?

Are you just saying, we hate dinosaurs, I'm sorry, 4-year-olds around the world, we are not funding that program? Let us know more specifically what you're going for so we can help kind of guide those conversations and catch any, you know, adjacent issues which might come up. If you're going net neutral, net zero, again, what are you increasing and where are you decreasing in order to make that budget match. One-time versus recurring. This is very important.

The one-time budget increase, for example, the 50th anniversary celebration, that's a one-time expense, and that is pulled back. If you have more questions, I will defer to the OMB director on how that works with the continuation budget process, but one-time funds are removed again when they start building the next year budget. Recurring budget expenses or increases, those are then built into the budget moving forward. So really thinking about, is this a special project that can be in a year, it's just a one-time thing, or is this a programmatic change that you're really hoping to see forever into the future? Best practices, please CC me on your emails, talk to me, let me know what you're thinking, submit your forms on time.

I'm here to help. If I don't know the answer, which is potential in my first year here, I, you know, phone a friend. So I will help find the answer and track that down for you, especially as it relates to those budget details. Talk to departments if you have a big program that you're trying to do. Estimates, quotes are helpful.

We want to make sure you're successful in your projects and we don't run out of money halfway through and then everybody's annoyed.

If you're doing a big operational change, You don't have to understand all of IGCs. I don't really either, but I know that some of those bigger changes can have an impact, and that might affect the dollar amount that you're working with. So again, the sooner we get that information, that'll help us flag and, you know, cross-check all the information that's needed. You will be getting all of this in an email along with the link to the form and contact information. That is everything that I have unless there are questions.

Okay, thank you. I'll add a couple things, then we'll go to questions. Just for folks' awareness as well, so I want to again point to the deadlines. So obviously, we, you know, you can prepare floor amendments up to really during the meeting. That's our common practice.

But I think in the particular context of the budget, it is helpful to start sooner. It doesn't mean that you have to have a fully fleshed idea and have everything figured out on the 4th, you know, for our work session, for example. But I think especially because the, you know, a budget, a lot of them need to be net zero, or at least, you know, there isn't just an extra pot of money to pull from. And so really working through kind of what the— where you can slot things in and how to accomplish that. So certainly, again, talking to staff departments, our budget analyst, OMB.

But also just to note, you know, our practice has been, for example, let's say you have an idea, you want to pitch an idea in the work session, you know, there is an opportunity to, for example, if you're not sure where it would be pulled from, we've written, you know, unused tax capacity or just kind of a placeholder statement. So I just want to also be clear for members, you know, the more you can figure out earlier, the better, especially in this very constrained environment. But also, the part of the work session's purpose on November 6th is to discuss these ideas, and then there's usually more than one way to solve for something, you know, whether it's looking at multiple years, looking at starting with just the first phase of a project versus the whole project, right? There's a lot of different versions of what that could look like. So I just want to encourage folks to get as much detail as you can, but also that it's not 100% figured out, especially for the work session.

That said, the earlier you can socialize an idea, the more that members have a chance to think about it, understand it, and of course, as we know from other contexts as well, it's hard to run last-minute things, right? So that's another opportunity just to say, even if, again, if you don't have the full idea worked out, talking about it earlier and then kind of working through, maybe you'll get a couple other members interested, but really just trying to help folks think through this process. And then the other thing I will say is just really appreciate the work of the budget analyst. You know, we've had these templates in the past, but I think taking another look at them and really helping make them more user-friendly has been— hopefully that will really help members understand. And especially, for example, this one-time versus recurring, that's something that had dropped off of our template.

And so there's been multiple instances where someone intended it to be recurring and then it dropped out of the budget and they thought, well, why did that get cut? Well, because the continuation budget by its nature cuts one-time things unless you put it back. So just kind of flagging a couple of those and wanted to make sure we had this opportunity before we get in the meat of it, because then we'll be right in the middle of budget. So with that, I'll see if there's— if members have questions, comments on these templates.

Oh, I was going to say just grateful. Thank you. This is super helpful.

Okay, I don't see any other members at this point, and I know, um, again, not everybody is here, but I know Miss Rocher will circulate this. And then again, if this is your first budget cycle, um, please avail yourself of our resources. You can sit down and really work through— you know, this is not— the expectation is you don't just go in a room and figure it out yourself. So there's a lot of help available. And then these are things to think about as we start getting briefed on the budget, which will happen tomorrow.

Okay, one more time I'll check. I don't see any other questions, comments, so thank you. We'll look for that email. And with that, we will turn to— that's our items of business for this month, so we'll turn to audience participation. Is there anyone who'd like to participate?

And then we'll let staff switch gears, get everything set up.

I hate podiums. Um, okay, okay, one second once she gets the timer set up.

And then while we're waiting, I'll just check, is there anyone else who'd like to do audience participation? Okay, don't see any. Uh, looks like timer is ready, so please proceed. All right, this is gonna be a short one, I think. Uh, Jamie Lopez, formerly homeless.

So, um, obviously budget. Um, assumed maybe if you cut Christopher Constant's wardrobe budget, it would solve all the mini budget problems. Apparently that does not do it. Um, so, so, People Mover— something I thought was interesting about that is you had, um, you know, they have buses. When the buses are involved in accidents, basically they get told there is an insurance claim that comes to actually do not go back to People Mover they go to the general fund too.

This thing is sort of working, sort of not working. Um, but anyways, that was something interesting because, you know, sort of capital expenditure, but it's, it's funding that you're— you shouldn't be expecting to come back to fund things.

Um, costs clearly out of control and probably get worse. Um, you have to consider, um, you know Is this thing working? Sorry. Okay, tools you're using and if it's the right tool for the job. And a lot of times it seems like you're using the wrong tool for the job, and then as a result of that, you're also not having successes, especially with a homeless situation.

And yeah, there are ways to sort of improve that situation, but then you wouldn't be paying overtime. Uh, so interesting here with the ATAX, um, said $500,000 for help with this outreach to a third-party navigation center. I'm curious what that is. Is that just to lease space within that building so they can do Zoom calls? That's so somebody can meet there and then just talk to people?

A lot of money. Um, so obviously, uh, non-congregate winter shelter Is it 98% of the budget spent and it's September? So that looks like that's gonna be over. And then you have Congress Shelter Annual Operations Contract, but that was for $1 million. And so it just went down to zero.

So what does that mean? That isn't exactly— it's a great tax, maybe there's an alternative funding stream. So aside from that, I think I'm just gonna end it because I didn't have much time and I ran in early. So anyways, thank you very much for your time. All right.

Okay, thank you for participating. And I don't see any other members of the public wishing to participate. So with that, we have concluded our business. And I'll note one more time, not this committee per se, but for the budget, we have a work session tomorrow, 10 AM to, I think, 11 AM to 4 PM. It's going to be a long one, but that's part one of our full review of the budget.

So we will see everyone at that time. And then in the meantime, we'll have a work session starting at 11:05 as noticed. All right, thank you. And no further comments, questions, then we are adjourned. Thank you.