Financial stability advisory committee to start meeting this month

Presenter: The outgoing city manager has selected 12 members for a financial stability advisory committee. They’ll start meeting at the end of the month, and will share recommendations at the end of the year, in her final meeting as city manager. With the City Council Sept. 8, Sarah Medary:

[00:00:15] Sarah Medary: As you might recall, before you went on your summer break, we had some good conversations about our long-term financial stability.

[00:00:22] Presenter: From that July 14 discussion, Chief Financial Officer Twylla Miller:

[00:00:27] Twylla Miller (Eugene, chief financial officer): Council would have a series of work sessions or a longer retreat in winter of 2026 to focus on long-range financial stability.

[00:00:35] The ad hoc committee, the focus of the group would be on the near- to mid-term or that six-year time horizon. The committee would receive information on general fund revenues, services provided by the general fund, and alternate sources for services historically funded through the general fund, such as library and park levies, the stormwater fee, and the community safety payroll tax.

[00:00:56] The committee could make recommendations on efficiencies, cost management strategies, future gap strategies, such as the general fund gap that will occur when the additional stormwater rate increase sunsets in six years, other revenue options and suggestions for long-term economic considerations.

[00:01:14] Presenter: Monday, Sept. 8, Sarah Medary:

[00:01:16] Sarah Medary: I laid out a framework for how we were going to approach that work, which includes the workshop with council. It also included a city manager committee that would be made up of technical advisors to take a look at our financials, our financials generally.

[00:01:32] So because you have a really full fall calendar, one of the things I committed to was giving you an update every Monday during this time, I’ll just give you and the public an update on where that work is at.

[00:01:45] So over the summer we did spend some time starting to formulate that committee and seating the members. So I was looking for folks that have a lot of technical expertise that are either in finance or operations, chief-of-staff-type people, economic development, and just really looked for a broad cross-section of folks that maybe are new to the conversation, not our regular folks that we see at a lot of our different committees.

[00:02:10] So happy to say that group is going to start gathering at the end of September. So we’ve asked them, I’ve asked 12 people, they all said ‘Yes.’ And we are working with Funk/Levis & Associates who are going to help facilitate and support that group and help us. They did very similar work in Springfield this year and got really good praise, so really looking forward to that.

[00:02:36] As I said, we’re inviting them in to look at some of our expenses and operations, look at economic development as a strategy. And we’ve said if they want to talk about revenue, they can, but that is the last thing they’ll talk about because we just had a pretty robust revenue committee that went through a lot of work. So we’ll provide that information to them.

They’ll start at the end of September. The plan is that we’ll meet pretty frequently in hopes that I have a draft set of recommendations by the end of the year that I can share with council in my last meeting on Dec. 10.

[00:03:09] Presenter: Sarah Medary speaks on the city’s financial stability Sept. 8. She shares the latest updates at Monday meetings of the Eugene City Council.