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Consideration of New Personnel During the departmental presentations, the Council received information regarding a number of unmet operational needs. Department Heads proposed a number of solutions to address those needs including the use of additional staffing. Although these positions have not yet received final review by the City Manager they are included here for Council consideration. They include the following: ❖ Finance 8s Accounting interns: 0.60 FTE (funded by water & sewer fees/business licensing fees). ❖ License Center Staffing: 3.0 FTE's (federal and state agent fees) ❖ IT Staffing: 3.0 FTE's (JPA's, tower rental fees) ❖ Fire Administration: 1.0 FTE (no cost — offset by other budget reductions) ❖ Parks 8s Rec Facility Stafiing: 0.50 FTE (property taxes) ❖ Administration intern: 0.25 FTE (property taxes) ❖ Police Patrol: 1.0 F'I'E (property taxes) Emplovee COLA & Healthcare contribution As noted during the Administration Department's initial budget presentation, the City's healthcare costs � are trending higher than in recent years which will put significantly more pressure on 2016 premiums. On our present course, we could see an increase as high as 10% compared to 1.0% or lower over the previous few years. Regarding Employee COLA, a number of peer cities have already settled around a 2% COLA for 2016 for employees covered under a collective bargaining unit. Most cities follow suit with a similar amount for non-union employees to ensure compliance with state pay equity laws. � Roseville's unions typically settle at amounts similar to other peer cities. In contrast, for non-union employees Roseville recently began tying employee COLA to two separate indices. The first is the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for all urban consumers in the Minneapolis/St. Paul region. The second is the Employment Cost Index (ECI) for State & Local Government Wages & Salaries for all workers on a national level. A local measure for the Employment Cost Index is not produced. � The CPI for the 12-month period ending 6/30/15 will not be available until late July but it's currently trending around 1%. The ECI for the 12-month period ending 03/31/15 is 1.8%. Tax Lev.�� As noted earlier, a number of operational concerns were identified in the departmental budget presentations. It's worth noting that there remains a number of unmet capital funding needs as well. Finally, the current budget relies on the use of cash reserves to balance the budget. This practice will need to be mitigated at some point in the near future. All of these factors place added pressure on next year's tax ]evy. The Council is asked to provide general direction on overall tax ]evy targets for 2016. For information purposes, the City's tax base is expected to grow about 1.4°/o overall in 2016 as estimated by Ramsey County. Page 2 of 4