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Regular City Council Meeting Monday, September 16, 2019 Page 2 6. Items Removed from Consent Agenda 7. Business Items a. Joint Meeting with Finance Commission Finance Chairperson Hodder, Commissioners Reif, Murray and Sagisser were at the meeting to review the items with the Council. Chair Hodder reviewed the 2020 City Manager Recommended Budget and Tax Levy and noted the commission's concurrence in the City Manager's recommen- dations Chair Hodder reviewed the Changes in Funding Strategies for the 2020-2039 Capital Investment Plan and noted the commission's concurrence in the Finance staffs recommendation. Mayor Roe explained the city has debt that was incurred in the early 2000's for the remodeling of city hall and the public works building. The city was paying approximately $765,000 a year towards that debt, which will be paid off in 2019. In 2020, the city will no longer be paying that debt. However, that money has been included in the tax levy each year. When the project was originally ap- proved, the understanding was that when the city was done paying off the debt, the debt payment would be removed from the levy. One of the things the Council has been discussing over the last ten years is the ongoing and future capital needs for infrastructure repairs and rehabilitation and replacements. One of the strate- gies the city has been using up to this point has been to apply existing levied funds for retired debt towards capital needs. This year, the last two funds that it is being applied to are the pavement management fund and the parks improvement fund, using the city hall project debt levy. Mayor Roe noted in the case of the facilities fund, the OVAL funding comes from state bonding money for which the city is requesting legislative approval.There are no tax levy dollars going towards that. By making changes to how the city uses existing levy capacity, the city is not asking taxpayers to pay more in their taxes to cover those capital infrastructure needs but rather, the city is able to use funds that are already being paid by taxpayers. The capital replacement funds are pretty well taken care of with these recommendations and there is actually the ability in the facilities fund to start looking at reductions in the level of funding going forward which is an important step to get to in this process. Mayor Roe thought the only other thing noted at the Finance Commission meet- ing was that the pavement management fund has been split into the municipal state aid fund versus the fund that is self-funded and the reason why the balance does not look the same,because that was shifted a little bit.