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Date: 09/12/OS <br />Item: 9. <br />Preliminary 2006 City Budget <br />Thursday, September 08,2005 <br />Council, <br />Attached are two memos from Chris about the budget. The first is <br />his supplemental response to Councilmembers' budget inquiries. <br />The second is his Request for Council Action regarding the <br />Preliminary Budget. <br />Also attached is another copy of the spreadsheet that was part of my <br />original budget memo back in July that details my recommendations <br />at various levy levels and the reasons for those recommendations. <br />Finally, remember that you have to approve a Preliminary Budget on <br />Monday. Some of you have talked about substantial cuts to my <br />recommended budget, which is fine. But, other than the ideas <br />discussed in Chris' first memo, no other Councilmember budget <br />ideas have been publicly detailed, to the best of my knowledge. <br />I fear you will have a hard time cutting hundreds of thousands of <br />dollars from the budget based on ideas detailed by you for the first <br />time at Monday's Council meeting. That doesn't sound like a good <br />process to me. Nor does it sound thoughtful to just propose cutting <br />the budget by some arbitrary amount on Monday while you work on <br />the details of your proposal later. <br />Therefore, I encourage you to reduce your budget-cutting ideas to <br />writing in as much detail as possible, as Councilmember Schroeder <br />did, and to share them before Monday's meeting. You need to <br />comply with Minnesota's public meeting law, so serial consecutive <br />discussions with three, four, or five councilmembers is not a good <br />idea. But if you reduce your proposals to writing and share them <br />publicly with council, staff, and the community, but without private <br />discussion among you, there shouldn't be a problem. <br />Neal <br />