The St. Helens City Council on Wednesday opened two public hearings related to the city budget: a supplemental fiscal year 2024-25 budget item and a public hearing on state revenue sharing and the proposed FY2025-26 budget.

A council member announced an actual conflict of interest and recused herself from the discussion and any vote because her husband is a City of St. Helens police officer. "I'm going to recuse myself from the discussion and the actual vote," the councilor said at the start of both hearings.

City staff summarized the supplemental item and the proposed state revenue sharing budget. Finance staff (identified in the packet as Gloria) said the supplemental resolution is intended to reclassify and properly appropriate expenditures that were not included in the FY24-25 budget; she said the supplemental does not increase total spending but adjusts categories to account for a downtown infrastructure project.

On the FY25-26 state revenue sharing budget, staff said the committee approved "option number 4," which reduces the originally proposed budget by $3,093,250. The reductions include no cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for FY2025-26 for all employee groups, withholding implementation of a proposed general service fee, and maintaining a general fund reserve of 6.2 percent after restoring full city council pay. The approved package also includes an increase to the business license fee for rentals and an impact fee of $4.95 to be charged on city-sanctioned event ticket sales; staff said they are working on a universal fee schedule and plan to present a resolution in July.

No final council votes on the FY24-25 supplemental budget or the FY25-26 state revenue-sharing budget were recorded during the hearing segment in the transcript; staff said the supplemental budget would return on the regular meeting agenda for adoption.

Public comment at the hearing criticized the decision to present a budget that assumes no COLA and said the council should have an agreement with employee unions before adopting a budget that depends on that outcome. A resident speaker said approving a budget without a negotiated union agreement amounted to a misleading fiscal presentation: "You're committing a fraud on the people by saying that you're going to approve a budget in which you have not yet had an agreement with your union," the speaker said. The commenter also repeated concerns raised in the Urban Renewal hearing about relying on expected property-sale proceeds for budgeting.

The council closed the hearings after receiving public comment. Staff will return budget items for further council consideration at a subsequent meeting where formal adoption votes are expected.