HomeMy WebLinkAboutFIN 2022-08-22 Item 1C - Budget - Budget Outreach Overview and Feedback to Date
City of Tukwila
Allan Ekberg, Mayor
INFORMATIONAL MEMORANDUM
TO: Finance and Governance Committee
FROM: Niesha Fort Brooks, Community Engagement Manager
Tony Cullerton, Deputy Finance Director
CC: Mayor Ekberg
DATE: August 11, 2022
SUBJECT: Budget Outreach Overview and Feedback to Date
ISSUE
City staff have been engaging the community on their priorities for the 2023/2024 biennial budget. This memo
and attachments provide an overview of the information shared with staff to date.
BACKGROUND
The Administration and Council share a common goal of gathering ideas and feedback from the community on
their priorities and ideas for the 2023/2024 biennial budget. Since early June, staff have engaged with
community members at a variety of different meetings, events, and community gatherings to talk – and most
importantly, listen – to the community about the budget. There have been three main ways that community
members can share their feedback:
Balancing Act – Online budget tool that allows individuals to propose ways to balance the City’s budget
by identifying potential service cuts, service increases, revenue reductions and revenue increases. 61
individual responses were received, though some of those were staff tests. Overview of results
attached as well as verbatim comments and suggestions.
Service Priorities & Revenue Ideas Boards – Staff attended a variety of community events (see attached
overview of budget outreach activities) and gathered feedback on service priorities and revenues by
asking community members to put dots on a board (see photos attached). Boards were translated in
Spanish, Vietnamese, and Somali.
Online Survey – The information on the boards discussed above were also used in an online survey
format. 65 responses were received, and the full report is attached to this memo.
Outreach remains ongoing and this memo covers feedback received before August 7, 2022.
DISCUSSION
In general, the feedback staff received is as diverse as the community we serve. As you will read in the
verbatim responses to the online survey and Balancing Act tool, folks have a wide variety of ideas and
concerns. Below is an overview of the general themes that came from each of the feedback mediums:
Balancing Act: The tool was deployed to allow users to balance the budget by reducing services and/or
increasing revenues. While we did have some community members use the tool, we also heard that it was
somewhat difficult to maneuver, took a long time and was perhaps too detailed. On the backend of the
program, it does not offer complete reports in an accessible format. After review of the CSV file output, it is
clear that the suggestions and comments are the most informative portion of the tool, and they are included
here as an attachment.
Service Priorities & Revenue Ideas Boards: Below are the results from the dot exercises to date listing
expenditure priorities and input on how to bridge the revenue/expense gap.
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INFORMATIONAL MEMO
Page 2
Expenditure priorities listed in order with total number of dots:
1. Youth Activities – 43
2. Communications/Community Outreach – 35
3. Police Services & Public Safety – 31
4. Senior Activities – 28
5. Human Services & Rental Assistance – 27
6. Fire & Emergency Medical Services – 25
7. City Future Planning – 22
8. Sidewalk & Crosswalk Maintenance – 21
9. Economic Development Activity – 20
10. Park & Trail Maintenance – 14
11. Community Emergency Preparedness – 14
12. Code Enforcement Activity – 11
13. Street Surface Maintenance – 9
14. Public Records Accessibility – 8
15. Traffic Calming Measures – 8
16. Foster Golf Course Operations – 6
17. Municipal Court Services – 6
18. Utility Infrastructure Maintenance – 5
19. Building Permit Issuance – 2
20. Other:
a. Middle School Programs – 1
b. Climate Action Plan – 1
Revenue ideas listed in order with total number of dots:
1. Increase gambling tax – 26
2. No tax increase, reduce services – 12
3. Add a Business & Occupation tax – 9
4. Increase property tax – 7
5. Increase fees for services – 4
6. Increase sales tax – 3
7. Other:
a. Cannabis shops – 2
b. Increase sin taxes – 2
Online Survey: Below are snapshots of the rank of service priorities from the online survey. Full survey
report included as attachment.
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INFORMATIONAL MEMO
Page 3
RECOMMENDATION
Information Only.
ATTACHMENTS
Biennial Budget Outreach Efforts
Balancing Act Overview & Verbatim Suggestions and Comments
Photos of the Service Priorities & Revenue Boards and Community Events
Online Survey Report
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City of Tukwila Biennial Budget Outreach Efforts – 2022
Administrative Services: Community Engagement Summer 2022
Board or Commission Staff Liaison Confirmed
Equity and Social Justice
Commission
Niesha Fort‐Brooks June 2, 2022, at 5:30pm
COMPLETED
Parks Commission Kris Kelly June 8, 2022, at 5:30PM
COMPLETED
Human Services Advisory Board Stacy Hansen June 16, 2022, at 10am
COMPLETED
Arts Commission Michael May June 22, 2022, at 6:00pm
COMPLETED
Planning Commission Wynetta Bivens June 23, 2022, at 6:30pm
COMPLETED
Library Advisory Board John Dunn July 5, 2022, at 6:30pm
COMPLETED
COPCAP Phi July 14, 2022, at 6:30pm
COMPLETED
Civil Service Commission Allen Wedge July 21, 2022, at 5:00pm
COMPLETED
Lodging Tax Advisory Board Brandon Miles August 12, 2022, at 11:30pm
COMPLETED
Leadership Chat (staff outreach) City of Tukwila 2023 – 2024 Biennial Budget
Wednesday, June 1, 2022, at 1:00pm Finance Department
Council Townhall Meeting Virtual
Tuesday, July 12, 2022, at 5:30pm Microsoft Teams
Click here to join the meeting
Tukwila Parks and Rec: See You In
The Park Series
Date, Time and Location
11:30am – 1:30pm July 13: Bicentennial Park
Concert in the Park with Food Trucks
COMPLETED
9pm to 11pm July 27: Tukwila Community Center
Movie in the Park
COMPLETED
6pm to 8pm August 10: Riverton Park
First Annual Tukwila Summer Park‐A‐Lympics
COMPLETED
6pm to 8pm August 24: Crestview Park
Bark in the Park Summer Festival
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City of Tukwila Biennial Budget Outreach Efforts – 2022
Administrative Services: Community Engagement Summer 2022
Tukwila Farmers Market Dates & Time | JUNE, JULY & AUGUST 2022
EVERY WEDNESDAY 4PM to 7PM
Sullivan Center July 6
COMPLETED
Sullivan Center July 13
COMPLETED
Sullivan Center July 27
COMPLETED
Sullivan Center August 3
COMPLETED
Sullivan Center August 17
Sullivan Center August 24
Sullivan Center August 31
Community Stakeholder Date & Time
Foster High School – Black Student Union June 7 | 2:30PM – 3PM
COMPLETED
Tukwila 2nd Annual Juneteenth Event Jun 18 | 2PM – 4PM
COMPLETED
Tukwila Community Center Senior Engagement June 23|11PM
COMPLETED
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Suggestions and Comments from the Balancing Act Tool
All suggestions included; no edits made
Develop Segale privatize golf and parks Maintenance sell old fire stations and some
properties or leases on some properties to outside sources
Moritorium on DA agreements increasing tax revenue. Contract out the golf course. Sell
surplus/ unused properties, old fire stations in so center , star nursery, unused parks.
Institute a hiring / wage freeze. Layoffs
Enforce the fireworks ban and give out citations
Implement a B&O Tax
This isn't a suggestion as much as a recognition of the process. I initially, just to see what the
budget looked like, cut 10% from every non‐police, non‐fire department. And what you
basically find is that without new revenue, you are still negative by more than $2 million,
which would demand 10% and 5% cuts from those departments. This is clearly a drastic
reaction, so we needed to increase revenue. I generally tried to bring our revenue rates in
line with Seattle in order to maintain services.
New revenues on businesses in our city
Increase revenues.
Add revenue stream.
Add B&O Tax
Fully implement programs and grants to maximize the work done in all areas. PW has the
most opportunity with the Infrastructure Bill. Allow fines for surface water polluters to fund
your required water quality programs and use the freed capital to support the street
sweeping, drain cleaning, flood patrol and prevention.
Add B&O Tax.
New revenue source like a b and o tax
* Amend zoning laws to enable location of more Cannabis stores
* Identify locations appropriate for short term rentals and raise the lodging tax on them.
Currently, do we even know where these businesses are operating?
* Raise development permit fees to better cover costs. (They do not currently cover costs)
B&O tax
Marginally increase taxes across the board, switch regular maintenance services where
possible to contracted services, privatize the enterprise funded items as well as other
ongoing maintenance. Including regular cleaning and mowing of the parks.
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Increase sales tax revenue by optioning allowable increases.
Re‐evaluate permit fees to insure ALL services are 100% covered by the fees. I spend time on
permit review that is not tracked that should be, pretty sure others do as well.
Petition state leg to allow for recoupment of costs associated with PRRs. With providing
everything digitally, we aren't even recouping the pathetic 5 cents per page and many of
these requests take hours and hours of staff time. Some balance between transparency and
costs to provide information should be found.
Make the golf course self sufficient or even profitable! It should not be a drain on the general
revenue! TCC and its programs should also be self sufficient, if not profitable.
Identify a new tax revenue stream.
Identify new tax revenues
Add B&O Tax
Add B&O Tax
After building the Stadium, we could see a steady source of income for many years to come
that would bring in millions of dollars.
Get rid of administrator. A Mayor is more than enough for a typical municipality.
Municipal Banking. Offer citizens from anywhere in the country access to savings, checking
and wealth building tools. It's basically what your doing with the GO bonds but you start your
own bank with the same setup as with the GO bond as your loan limits would be based on
your expected revenues. With this bank you can have access to federal reserve money at low
rates and could be leveraged by 9x and provide a significant amount of capital. Your already
doing this process but your paying middle men to take fees from you for nothing, for no
reason but paperwork. Start a Tukwila Municipal Bank today! Stop paying servicing fees just
to access money from another entity. Create your own Municipal Bank. Look it up on google
there are some cities doing it already. I heard LA was working on one too. Let's get ahead of
the coming economy and create our own nestegg as a community. This is most effective and
efficient way to access to potential revenues of our city. This would allow us to invest in
anything a bank does now including offering bonds ourselves.
Sales tax is primarily shouldered by the poorest folks in our community we need to charge
the businesses that want to work here. We are a prime location and if they don't like our fees
we wait for folks that will pay it. With zero sales tax we create demand for stores selling tax
free items here. We can use this fact to get business to come.
Bowling Alleys should pay Admission Tax.
Again Fines should not be part of any kind of budget, we create a situation where we depend
on people breaking the rules. Or possibly fines being issued more frequently or more strictly
than might be necessary to increase our budget. This seems like a horrible situation.
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Why can't we increase our cities investments? Could we issues more bonds? Could we offer a
municipal savings account for anyone in the country and use that money to do it? Could we
open a municipal bank and self finance our budget?
What are the cost over runs for the Hiser building? Why do we have a paid mayor and a city
administrator? Why is it that the city of Seattle paid their PW $1,000 bonus for working during covid
and several other city did the same but Tukwila is hurting for funds. Need to sell the golf course and
develop the segale properties!
Put a freeze on wages and hiring for now . Place a moratorium on DA agreements for the next 5
years...these developments use all the services but pay no taxes to support them . This would help
build a tax base so the city would be less impacted by so center fluctuations. Sell unused city
properties like the old fire station in so center , star nursery or unused parks like southgate saving
maintance and upkeep $$$.
Highlight more of our attributes...sea wolves, encourage more 5ks on our trail like the sounders 5k.
I started with an across the board 2% decreases in spending ‐ not sufficient. 5% across the board was
also insufficient. The next step was a 10$ decrease in Police, Fire (both Supression and
Prevention/Investigation),and Public Works (both Engineering and Streets). At this point in the
brutality I then saw a $55,839 surplus. This may mean that an across the board decrease of 7‐8% may
do the job rather than having some areas have a 10% cut while others have 5%
INCREASE LITTER CLEAN UP AND EDUCATION
Mental Health Responders for homeless outreach
Fully fund your infrastructure and the rest will take care of itself. Raise fees and rates in all areas to
fully fund PW and supporting efforts and your community will have safe streets, with every street
light on, bridges that stand up to time, water in every fire hydrant and no sewer backups or floods
that destroy buildings, roads and businesses.
Before building all the "shiny objects" that departments offer as good ideas, do a thorough evaluation
of the M&O costs and understand the staff impacts to support the new "shiny objects." Tukwila loves
to spend money on building and implementing new things and projects, but NEVER considers the
long‐term impacts of what it will take to own, operate, and maintain. The PSP is a perfect example of
spending **WAY** beyond the means of the City to get something new and shiny without fully
understanding the costs to build (I mean, just how far over budget is it, really, well over 50% over
budget and approaching 100% over budget) and the long term costs to operate and maintain. This
also applies to park plans, city‐wide free wifi, all the toys that PD and Fire want, and more. While they
are great plans and ideas, they are NOT FREE and impact the overall financial wellness of the City!
Build a City‐Owned Stadium that can be leased to professional sports teams and reward Tukwila
residents with drastically reduced rates.
Let's not cut police.
The police have been asked to do to many jobs in our society for to long. They need a break and
deserve help from our community. We need to remove as many tasks that don't have anything to do
with policing. We shouldn't have asked them to shoulder so much and we should start by cutting their
budget by as much as is safe to do so.
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I think recently the fire department had something like a million dollars in overtime, shore up that
and be a little more intelligent with staffing and that would be like a 5% cut but really it would just be
an elimination of a wasteful activity.
Reduce overtime/ call outs. Also reconfigure so if its an aid call ( which is the majority of calls ) they
don't have to take the ladder truck but can take an aid vehicle instead
Hand over to south king county fire…like you should have done years ago.
cut the engineering postions and farm out what you can't do in house
administration can always be cut, but instead it seems to continously grow showing itself as a needed
service when it's a cost that if we are thinking of "cutting" important services like police and fire, the
city staff can handle waiting a little longer.
Start at the top
These are the parts of the government that everyone has some interaction with. They provide most if
not all paperwork most people need to interact with the city. This process should be as simple and
quick as possible. I think it's possible to make the experience more effective and interesting to the
citizens. The clerk will know how to use the additional funds in my opinion better than the council.
Instead of haveing all the see you in the parks , just have 1 tukwila days / wildlife festival weekend at
the tcc reducing staff hours planning , setting
up and staffing multiple events. Stop trying to build a 2nd community center.
Contract out some of the mowing etc saving benefits and wages
If you look at the parks, over the years you see them cutting back on their areas they focus on. the
Green river trail used to be mowed a lot more they used to have a lot more cutting back and cutting
back, I remember a time when the grass was green in the summer at some of the lesser known parks.
It would be nice if they had staff that could support reliable maintenance.
No new park until the parks we have can be maintained and regulated properly.
Fully Fund Finance.
Start at the top. Why does the mayors office need this big of a budget ?
In these times I believe it is up to the entire government to lead our city by example by elimination of
everything unnecessary. I believe this has to include eliminating the salaries of the leadership. Public
service is a privilege and should be provided for free. The money can be used for an increase of other
folks pay rates
The court is where an individual can have the lives completely or partially destroyed in an instant.
Many people are terrified to set foot inside of one, especially any immigrants or black or brown folks.
It is our responsibility to do best we can to fund these services so we can support our community to
grow stronger. Our courts should be a place we can begin to heal and trust each other again. If we all
know that in our city we will treat everyone with respect and will not tolerate any type attacks our
community.
If these are GO bonds can we delay our payments for a few years somehow without messing up our
bond worthiness?
Contract out running of the golf course and maintenance to private company
Golf should be able to pay for itself.
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2023–2024 BUDGET COMMUNITY OUTREACH
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