Tigard budget committee elects chair, expands grant subcommittee and sets budget calendar

The Tigard budget committee on Jan. (date not specified) elected Kelly Pemond as chair and Gregory Brown as secretary, voted to expand the social services and community event grants subcommittee from three to five members and selected committee and council representatives to serve on that panel.

The committee’s modified subcommittee will include two council members and two budget-committee community members, with a fifth “floating” seat that can be either a councilor or a committee member. The committee voted to appoint Felipe Aguilar and Gregory Brown as the two community representatives and to include Councilor Jeanette Shaw, Councilor Heather Robbins and Council President Maureen Wolf on the panel. The motions passed by unanimous voice vote; individual vote counts were not specified in the meeting record.

Finance Director Eric Kang told the committee the meeting was a planning session under Oregon budget law and outlined the schedule and deliverables leading to the proposed FY 2026 budget. Kang said the proposed budget will be published on April 10 and the committee’s formal review meetings are scheduled April 26 (a full-day session), May 12 and May 19, with city council adoption targeted in mid-June.

Kang delivered the city’s second-quarter financial snapshot, saying general fund and debt service collections are ahead of the city’s internal forecast for the first half of the fiscal year. “Overall, revenue, we are, fairly consistent with where we’re at last year,” he said. Kang flagged timing effects in several revenue categories — for example, property taxes and business-license receipts are seasonally concentrated — and warned a planned vendor transition for automated traffic enforcement could depress fines and forfeiture revenue in the near term.

Kang also outlined FY 2026 budget priorities staff will present in the proposed document: advancing public works and police facility planning (including bond-measure preparation) and completing the city’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation (the vendor-facing “Tyler/UNI” replacement project). He noted the city has received long-running Government Finance Officers Association awards and an S&P upgrade in recent years, achievements he attributed to sustained fiscal stewardship.

The briefing identified several uncertainties the committee will consider during budget deliberations: potential cuts to Washington County library funding (the county has asked some departments to prepare for reductions), ongoing volatility in financial markets and interest rates, an expiring labor contract with Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and broader economic risks such as tariff-driven inflation. Kang said the county’s guidance could reduce the city’s WCCLS (Washington County Cooperative Library Services) general-fund support by an estimated portion of the current allocation; the voter-approved portion of the library levy is not subject to that reduction.

Budget Manager Colina Plath reviewed logistics for the committee’s work, including training resources supplied by the state and the GFOA review process. Plath said the city intends to expand online, searchable access to budget materials through the new budgeting software being implemented so community members can more easily find program-level information without scanning a lengthy PDF budget book.

Chair Pemond and the committee closed the planning session by confirming the subcommittee membership and the schedule for the next steps in the FY 2026 budget process.

The committee did not take final appropriations at this meeting; those decisions will occur after the proposed budget is published and after public hearings in April and May.