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City of Roseville — 2012 Budget Letter of Transmittal December 12, 2011 To the Mayor and City Council, Enclosed is the 2012 City Budget as prepared by City Staff, in accordance with City Council direction. The 2012 Budget culminates nearly a year's worth of planning, evaluation, and input from the City Council, advisory commissions, citizens and staff. Great effort has been taken to ensure that the City's core services are funded in a manner that preserves the greatest value to the community. In addition, steps have been taken to account for the changing trends and impacts that will affect both next year's and future year's budgets. For 2012, the City continued its priority -based budgeting approach that is designed to better equate service levels with spending decisions. This process was also designed to reflect employee time spent analyses and give greater transparency on where financial resources are allocated. In addition, it ensured that the programs and services that were more highly desired by the community received sufficient funding. This process included over a two dozen public meetings held for the purposes of soliciting input and to gauge citizen reaction to proposed service offerings. It also included a Citizen Survey that was used to determine citizen priorities and program expectations. The level of public participation opportunities during the budgeting process was significantly more than in previous years — a specific objective outlined in the City's Imagine Roseville 2025 (IR2025) long -term visioning process. For 2012, the City projects a stabilization of city revenues including interest earnings and other non -tax revenues that support the City's Police, Fire, Public Works, and Parks & Recreation functions. Some of these revenue sources had been stagnant or intermittent during the past few years. A small property tax levy increase was enacted to strengthen the City's vehicle and equipment replacement programs which lacked the necessary resources to replace capital assets at the optimal time. Despite this increase, Roseville residents still pay less for city services than most peer cities and as a percentage of household income, residents pay less than they did a decade ago. Despite an overall strengthening in the City's financial condition, the City expects to face a number of financial challenges for 2012 and beyond. They include: ❑ Maintaining a competitive employee compensation and benefit package ❑ Continuing to strengthen the City's asset replacement funding mechanisms ❑ Establishing on -going funding to implement the recommendations set forth in the Imagine Roseville 2025 process All of these impacts have been on -going for the past several years. Each of these impacts is addressed in greater detail below.