Memphis Meetings

Paul Young

Person

Speaking turns

• Special Meeting: Memphis City Council: April 21, 2026 14:06

  All right. Thank you, Chairwoman, and thank you, city council, for uh having me here today. This is obviously a big deal for all of us. This is our third budget together. Um and I feel like this is a strong budget that you all will appreciate and so this budget was really built with a clear focus of delivering for the people of our city. And uh I look forward to getting into it with you. We're going to do this in a presentation style. Um, and so we'll get the screen ready momentarily. And there you go. Uh, so I'm going to go on to the to the next slide. Um, and so as I mentioned, this is a budget that did not happen overnight. We thought very strategically over it. And so this slide really outlines the timeline of how we got here. We started in January uh, with a budget kickoff. U, we went through the next few months identifying what the gaps were. Uh we worked to identify where the cost pressures were going to be. Uh we wanted to identify what solutions we could find to address those cost pressures. We worked with every single division uh to get to where we are today. This was not a paper exercise. We challenged all of the numbers in every division to make sure that when we brought this budget to you, it was something that we could stand behind. Uh go to the next slide. And um I want to also note that we didn't just use assumptions when we came into this. We built it based on hard decisions. Our team worked with the University of Memphis to uh do revenue estimates because we wanted an independent voice on how we're going to determine what the revenues will look like moving forward. Uh we wanted to reset it so that it could reflect some of the true costs that we're seeing. We knew that we had some unavoidable increases, things like pension costs, health care costs, uh compensation costs. Uh we wanted to make sure that we were able to absorb those things. We evaluated more than $150 million worth of pressures and reduction opportunities. Uh we reviewed about $ 38.2 million worth of division requests. So when we went to the divisions, we asked them what things they needed or wanted to do to advance in their area. There were about $38 million worth of requests. And of course, not everything that was submitted could be funded. So we made significant tradeoffs as we went through the process. Uh but that is how we delivered a fully vetted FY27 budget. Uh so some of the priorities uh are priorities that have carried us through uh this administration. We have a focus on developing thriving neighborhoods and obviously that's rooted in addressing public safety and removing blight. Uh we have a focus on building up housing in the core of our city. We have an emphasis on developing our workforce in our young people. And then we have an emphasis on ensuring that we use culture as an economic driver because we believe that's an area where we have an competitive advantage. Um, and so before I go into the depths of FY27, I just want to do a really quick recap of some of the things that we've achieved in FY 26. Um, so just looking at uh some of the things that we've done around uh blight and restoring some of the pride in our neighborhood by removing trash. Over 600 tons of uh debris has been collected. 86,000 bags of trash, 25,000 tires collected. Our teams have been out there doing the hard work um on violence prevention. As you know, with our joint office in place, we have been working to invest in nonprofits that are doing the intervention and prevention work to address public safety in tandem uh with the work that is happening with our law enforcement partners. Uh we have been doing work to assist the community. So about 1,700 expungements have taken place. 326 driver's license reinstatements. And all of that equates to about 106,000 economic impact of having uh those individuals being able to go about their daily lives getting to and from work. So this is assisting the community. Uh our teams have been serving with excellence. We've had about 350,000 uh emergency calls. Uh and one of the things that we're really proud of is that we have a 95% uh of those 95% of those calls were answered within 20 seconds. And so our communications professors professionals through fire and police are doing amazing work to make sure that they are supporting this community in their times of need. Um on our young people, this past summer, we had about 1,800 young people that had jobs as a result of the employee program. about 800 young people have uh afterchool programming through the MAP program and 493 students are participating in the boss program. If you recall, this is the program where uh we relieve some of the GPA requirements so that individuals that may not have the grades but still need the opportunity are able to participate. So, this is something that we're really proud of. And then with our parks programming, over 348,000 individuals have participated, whether it's through our community centers, our park programming. Uh the program called Play Your Park on Fridays throughout the summer where we have individuals that are uh out supporting our young people with different games and opportunities in our parks. We have seen a significant amount of people participating in these programs and this is something that we're also proud of. Uh on the housing front, in this past year, we've had 800 units delivered uh on the housing front. And this is something, as you all know, we've talked about our 10,000 housing unit goal. These 800 units are moving us towards that mark. Um and then when it comes to all of the work that we've been doing, it's all contributed to where we see ourselves when it comes to crime reduction. uh this this slide and I think this is an important slide for you all to see. Uh this shows over the past 25 years where we've been when it comes to crime and as you can see the high water marks are 2006 and 2023 the year before we started our term. Uh and as you can see 2023 was one of the highest years but as you can see following that uh our teams have been putting in the work and we've seen a 40% uh reduction in crime. When we came in, we set a goal of reducing crime 10% year-over-year for four years. We've achieved that goal and that would equate to a 40% reduction. We've achieved that goal in two years, but that's because of all of the work that we have done together. And then we'll look at it here. It just drills it down even more. This is uh serious crime month by month. The red line is 2023. Those are the number of serious crimes per month, January, February, March, and so on. And if you look at the red line, that was 2023. The blue line is 2024. The white line is 2025. And then the yellow line at the bottom is where we are today. And if you look along those lines, you'll see where we started various initiatives like the 38 $39 million grant uh that came in as soon as we started our work uh with this administration. Code zero, camera tech, all of the initiatives are there, but as you can see, the work that we've done has contributed to a much lower crime rate. Now, nobody's doing victory laps. We know we have a lot more work to do, but this does give us a clear picture of where we have been and where we are as we stand today. All right. So, I want to get into uh the budget and this budget represents months of scrutiny, a lot of tough choices and dedication to get here. But uh let's go right in. I want to start by saying with our operating budget that this is a peopledriven budget. Our total budget is about $897 million that we are proposing. $652 million of that is personnel. That's 72% of the budget. 72% of the budget is invested in the people who are delivering the services each and every day. Um I want to first say we are proud of our negotiation efforts this year. Um we have a 2% increase across the board that we are proposing in this budget for all city of Memphis employees. uh we have reached agreement with all but I think one of the um the unions and so there will be more dialogue about that but we do have an agreement with the rest of the unions on this 2% and the 2% applies not only to the unions but also to all of the employees of the city of Memphis. Um and most of our total investment on this slide is in personnel. I want to reiterate that again. We have about 88% of our budget is going to personnel in public safety, anti-bllight, and infrastructure teams. That's fire, police, community enhancement, public works, and engineering. And we can go to the next slide. All right. So, this is where we start to get into some of the meat of it. Um, yes, there were increases that were driven by pensions and salary growth, but we also cut some of the non-essential spending and made room for some strategic investments. Um, and so I'll start at the top. Uh, what you see there is a 2% increase. That's really due to some of the salaries, healthc care, and the salary increases over this year. Uh, we see a reduction on materials and supplies of about 5% that represents cuts to non-essential spending. uh we have a higher investment in community beautifification, workforce training and mATA that represents the 7% in the general and sorry in the grants and subsidies. Uh we have uh restored the management fees as you may recall last year we cut some of those. We restored them in this budget uh because we know that those um agencies that are managing city facilities are also dealing with a lot of the cost pressures that we are. Um the housing trust fund. Um we last year we funded I think 2.65 million. This year we're funding it at three million. Uh library services there were some increases in retirement. And then our portion that we paid towards uh the Grizzly shortfall annually is also included in here. Next I'll talk about some of the revenue. Um, one of the positive things is that the second XAI facility came online which resulted in an additional $15 million in our budget uh for a total amount of roughly $26 million that is uh coming from that facility. Uh we did reset our auto registration fees to align with the actual collection levels. uh we have been watching that line and I think we had overestimated in previous years and so we want to rightsize that and then we also on the federal grant size this is just the removal of non-recurring revenue sources all right on this slide this is where we looking at it from a divisional perspective and I like I said earlier every team uh has been a part of these discussions and they've been some painful discussions if we've gone through and trying to identify where we can make the necessary reductions to make this budget work. They work to identify savings reducing their costs and it really was a citywide effort. Uh you'll see at the top in executive some of the increases you see there is expanding some of the youth services programming and we also added the comprehensive planning office which was previously in finance. So when you see that reduction in finance, it's just a move of people from one service center to another that's causing some of that. Uh we also removed unfunded VA we unfunded some of the vacancies. So let me speak on that just for a minute. The positions still exist and if we need to fund those positions, we can come back to you and get the funding to do it. But in order to balance the budget, one of the things that we did in many of the vision pretty much across the board was remove funding from vacancies because we know that those don't touch warm bodies and we want to make sure that we kept the warm bodies that are currently working with the city able to keep doing that work. Uh and we still maintained enough vacancies to ensure that we're still able to execute on the services uh that we need. All right. CIP spending. Uh we have a roughly $16 million uh capital spend. When it comes to CIP, uh we kind of organize them in different buckets here. Critical neighborhood infrastructure about $ 36 million, 34%. Uh creating community spaces about 14% of the budget. That's $15 million. You can see the rest. I won't just read all the numbers to you, but as you can see, it's a pretty balanced uh CIP budget. And just drilling in a little more on some of those in the housing division. Uh you all had an opportunity this morning. I know some of you most of you were there uh when we visited Southwest Twin. Uh that is probably one of the larger areas in housing and community development, but there's also some infrastructure tied into there. Uh under parks, there are some community center upgrades. uh the Belleview Tennis Center um and other parks facilities are included in that line. And then under public works, paving roads and road work. If you all are like me, which I know you are, you hear often about the work that we need to do to ensure that we're getting our roads where they need to be. Uh we're putting a significant amount of those dollars into paving. All right. I wanted to show this slide because this is an important thing that we've talked about every budget season and I want to remind everyone where we have been. Um, and so if you look at FY22, that's where we had a $10 million contribution, but I want you to look above that and I want you to remember that we had ARPA at that time. Um, and ARPA kind of artificially inflated where our numbers were. Uh we had spent 43 million in in ARPA money which allowed us to have a $10 million surplus. In FY23 we spent 47 million in ARPA which allowed us to have a 5.9. In FY24 even with the 65 million we still were uh 11 million under. And so where we are now is uh where we are now is FY25. We had $1.9 million that we were under. So, we were getting things organized where it needed to be. FY26, we're expected to have a $2 million surplus. And then in this year, in this budget, we balance the budget with a zero contribution. Now, I will say there are some things happening on the revenue side that I think could contribute to there being a higher amount. Um there's some questions at the state level as to whether they're going to maintain a bill where they're going to provide dollars to the city based on the population annual estimates. Uh there's a bill up there to pause that and I think that it may get traction and that would allow us to be able to have a contribution if that does move forward. All right. So, now let's talk about what are we going to actually deliver? Uh, many of you have heard 3,000 summer jobs this year for young people. Um, and so we are expecting that to happen. Um, and this budget delivers that. It continues the R3 program. It also puts $1.5 million into our opportunity youth workforce training program. So, this is training young people for the jobs of the future. And it also allows us to contribute to our urban fellows program which is our summer internship program where we have college students from out the re from throughout the region really across the country that come here uh to work in jobs right here at the city of Memphis. Uh on the housing side, I mentioned the $3 million to the housing trust fund. We have $1 million going to what we're calling the middle income housing infrastructure uh program. And so this is a program where developers will be able to access dollars to do public infrastructure which would allow for the creation of development in the core. One of the things you'll often hear are the the costs of some of the infrastructure related to that housing oftent times prevents them from getting projects done. This allows us to have some resources to support that. And then there's $10 million uh in federal funds that comes through the division of housing and community development to support housing and community efforts. On the culture, remember I said at the beginning culture as an economic driver, we have an increase of roughly $825,000 that we want to provide to the office of creative and cultural economy. Um we also launched the initiative Memphis Music Live 365. Those dollars are intended to support the whole culture ecosystem. Obviously, there's a lot more money necessary, but we want to begin putting the dollars in that allow us to have the impact that we want to have in this space. And then on this one, I just wanted to just have a quick list as I get ready to close on what are some of the things that are going to be delivered. This is a mix of things from the operating NCIP budget, but I'm just going to read them out really quickly because I know there's a lot of words, but the police station at Southwest Twin is funded in this BA budget. The design for the pool at Glen View that we've talked about is in this budget. Uh improvements for the North Frasier Community Center. A new library, the design for the new library in Parkway Village, $20 million for paving and potholes, 3,000 jobs for the employee program. Upgrades at the tennis facility at Belleview, upgrades at the Overton Shell, free summer camp at 25 locations, upgrades to Guch Park in North Memphis, a south the South City Museum. This is going to allow for that uh in the former Porter Junior High School. Purchasing of 20 snowplow attachments. These are attachments that will go onto our uh dump trucks and other large vehicles to support uh when we need that support during those weather instances. $7 million for early childhood education, upgrades to our asphalt plant, which will allow us to be able to produce our own asphalt so that we can do more roads, new golf clubhouse at Ottoman uh golf course, upgraded trails and greenways at Wolf River, Chelsea Green Line, and the Overton Park, and Raleigh Community Center design and renovation. And so these just outline some of the things that are included in this budget that I think we should all be proud of because we are working to deliver for the people of our community. And I will just close with saying uh this is a budget where we work to hold the line on spending. Uh it's a balanced budget. It does not propose a tax increase at a time when we know that the costs are really high to uh everyone in our community. Uh and it also offers a 2% increase for our employees so that they can uh sustain their lives and address some of those rising costs that they're experiencing just like everybody else. And so uh I look forward to this budget season. I know there will be robust conversation and dialogue. Uh but this is the budget that we are presenting to you. I think uh in momentarily our team will be delivering the budget books to your offices upstairs. Um and unless you have questions for me, that will conclude my presentation. Thank you, Mayor Young. Thank you so much for your presentation. At this time, we will now open the floor for public comments. Madam Controller, if you'll please put the times. Leona Benia, if you'll please come down. And after that, Miss Amber Sherman.

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