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Regular City Council Meeting Monday, February 12, 2024 Page 12 Councilmember Strahan appreciated the suggestion of including the Finance Commission's expertise as much as possible along these lines. She hoped the City would lean toward using the Finance Commission and their expertise. Mayor Roe suggested, since the summary document is on the screen, to transition to the communication side of it, noting today's bench handout was a conglomeration of three different documents into one. One of them is the plus/minus report and the other one is the fund balance analysis for each fund and finally the expense detailed description for the function's areas within a fund. Right now, these are three separate documents and never really meet so he tried to find a way to combine them together to make it a little easier to track. He reviewed the combined Funds Financial Summary for all funds, which is a nice starting point with the next couple of pages being a breakdown by function. This corresponds very closely with the City budget document that is published each year. The next four pages are the Expenditure Reconciliations and Revenue Reconciliations which gets into the changes from last year's budget to this year's budget in the various areas. He noted this seems to put it together in a way that is easier to track. Councilmember Etten indicated he liked the changes as it makes it easier to see what is going on. Mr. Trudgeon noted this is information staff has, it just needs to be assembled in a different manner. Mayor Roe indicated regarding the graphical documentation of information, he tried to capture trends over time in different ways. He reviewed the graphics with the Council. He indicated the graphics are different ways to show information with trends over time and try to help present information graphically. Councilmember Schroeder liked the graphics because it is multiple years in order to compare them as well as the different indexes to compare. Councilmember Strahan thought a lot of them were hard to understand and if a person is not tech savvy in revenue, some of the hundred percent bars will lose them. She thought some of these that are visual are easier to make some assessments about. She wanted to make sure that the graphics are not just a pretty thing that does not do anything for the public,or provide extra value. She stated on attachment two, there are so many topics that she did not see it as a useful chart. She did not want to have a graph for the sake of a graph. She also wanted to make sure that whatever the Council asks is a logical thing about staff and that it is user friendly for a lay person. Councilmember Etten tended to agree with Councilmember Strahan that some of the graphs were hard to understand compared to others. He thought a lot of these are too much information to understand in a graph.