2020/12/16 Council Agenda Packet

Committee Members, Timeline and Process Committee Members were appointed by Mayor Franklin. We come from a broad range of backgrounds and hold a wide array of political views, which has made for lively discussions at times. Those of us who participated through the entire process and have approved this report are identified on Attachment A. • Mayor Franklin appointed local businessman Dan Leach to serve as our Committee Chair. The Committee was supported by City staff and an independent facilitator. We met approximately twice a month starting in late June 2020; each of our eight meetings lasted about an hour and a half. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, all our meetings were held remotely via Microsoft Teams. We added one additional meeting to the original seven planned in order to complete our work. Our final meeting was held on November 5. All our meeting agendas, meeting summaries and meeting materials were posted online on the City's website. Staff kept a log of any unanswered questions that arose during meetings and ensured we were later provided with a written response to all such questions. Our first several meetings were dedicated to learning about the City's General Government budget structure and challenges. None of the Committee Members are public finance experts, so this was an important foundation for us. Our last few meetings were focused on developing findings and recommendations. Both Mayor Franklin and Councilmember Scott Murphy (Chair of the Council's Budget and Finance Committee) made helpful introductory remarks at our first meeting. Major topics we reviewed over the course of this process are outlined below: • We began by learning about the City's General Government funds: what they pay for, where their revenues come from, and the ongoing gap between General Government revenues and expenditures that the City must, by law, close each year in some manner. • We reviewed the steps that the City has taken in the last twenty years to close the General Government deficit and looked at the projected gap between revenues and expenditures through 2027. • We looked at the results of a benchmarking study comparing Everett to peer cities —what services are offered by other cities, their demographics and comparative revenue strategies. We also heard what some of these cities are planning to do in response to their current financial challenges —Everett is not alone in facing difficult times. • We reviewed detailed proposals by each General Government department of how they would implement a hypothetical 15% expenditure reduction if needed, and we had the opportunity to ask questions of the police chief and fire chief as well as other department heads about these hypothetical cuts. These presentations illustrated the extent of cuts made to date, and emphasized that further significant cuts potentially mean eliminating staff positions —and accompanying reduction in the service levels supported by those staff— assuming status quo conditions with existing salary and benefit plans. • Staff reviewed with us the ideas they presented to the Mayor and City Council at the beginning of 2020 for closing the ongoing gap between General Government revenues and expenditure. These ideas generally can be sorted into three categories: (1) Making further service cuts (2) Shifting some city functions to new taxing districts; and 2