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Finance Commission Minutes August 21, 2014 Page 8 of 9 Commissioner Bachhuber asked what kind of continuous improvement practices the City had or if there was a process for the City to look for ways to be more efficient. Finance Director Miller stated the practices are in place but the documentation of these practices is not. It is part of the City's culture to continually look for ways to create new efficiencies, new innovations, and to capitalize on partnerships and cooperative purchasing opportunities. Chair Schroeder asked if the City uses matrixes to gauge how these efficiencies are going. Finance Director Miller stated each department does this differently but different benchmarks and matrixes are used. Chair Schroeder stated that the Commission is just becoming familiar with the budget but in the future they would be more interactive with it. One of the tasks for the Commission is to determine what communities Roseville could be compared to. She asked whether the matrixes used by the City could be used to determine other communities to which Roseville would compare. Finance Director Miller stated some of these could be used but the challenge would be having those peer cities calculate the same information in the same manner. Mr. Grefenberg stated according to the 2015 proposed City Manager's Budget, $340,000 of the proposed increase or 40%, is adding back into the reserve for last year's use. He encouraged the Commission to look at this piece. He asked if this would be paying back into a budget reserve that was already over the maximum. Chair Schroeder stated this is paying back reserves but in a way, it is actually covering the part of the budget that was covered by the reserves so going forward, they do not have the reserves to cover the budget. Finance Director Miller clarified the $340,000 would be coming out of the General Fund. The 2014 Budget called on the use of $346,000 of reserves to spend down a budget gap. The City Manager is recommending the City be cautious of relying of doing this. Finance Director Miller explained the City Council would approve the preliminary not to exceed tax levy on September 6 and adopt afinal budget in December. Commissioner Hodder stated wages have been stagnant for the last few years and the City needs to be cognizant of levy increase impacts for homeowners. Commissioner Bachhuber asked what portion the City property taxes and the Housing Redevelopment Authority (HRA) taxes make up the property tax bill. Finance Director Miller stated for a typical single-family home in Roseville, the HRA portion is about $35 annually. If the City Council adopts their proposed levy, this would increase