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Home My WebLink About08-18-26 Public Comment - E. Talago - Public Comments for tonight's CC meetingFrom:Emily Talago To:Bozeman Public Comment Subject:[EXTERNAL]Public Comments for tonight"s CC meeting Date:Tuesday, August 18, 2026 11:51:19 AM Attachments:Comment_ Mill Levy Adoption.pdf Comment_ Special Assessment Schedules.pdf CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe. Hello, Could you please receive and file these public comments under their respective category? With gratitude, Emily Talago bcc: Bozeman City Commission Dear Mayor and Commissioners, Thank you for receiving my previous public comment regarding the special assessment methodology policy. I write again today on the resolutions before you affixing the special assessment schedules for FY27. Each of the proposed resolutions before you this evening contains a schedule spreadsheet. That schedule is the actual dollar amount that will be assessed and billed to every parcel, and once adopted and certified to Gallatin County, it becomes real bills sent to real property owners, in many cases passed through to tenants who have no way of knowing whether their portion reflects an error. You each took an oath of office to faithfully discharge your duties, and as elected trustees of public funds, you owe a fiduciary duty to the people who will receive these bills, a duty to make sure the numbers going out the door are correct before they leave the building. I've spent time cross-referencing the FY26 and FY27 schedules against the City's own parcel and zoning records, and I have identified specific, documentable errors affecting several dozen parcels, falling into a few clear patterns: ● Parcels that should carry the 15,000 square foot cap under current rules, but don't. E.g. RGG7333 (Babcock Vista), zoned RA (formerly RO), does not show the 15,000 sq ft cap that should apply. ● Parcels that shouldn't be capped, but are. E.g. RGH5164, now zoned REMU (formerly RS) and nonresidential, still shows a cap. ● Parcels whose zoning classification on the assessment schedule itself does not match the City's own zoning map. E.g. RGG5804, the southern 2/3 of the eastern side of Wagon Wheel Mobile Home Park, is listed as RA on the zoning map (part of the UDC update), but appears billed as wholly B2-M on the assessment schedule. ● Parcels whose cap regime changed on paper after the UDC rezoning but were never recalculated. Former R-O parcels that landed in a capped district had their assessed figures adjusted accordingly; former R-MH or R-S parcels that were rezoned did not receive the same treatment, despite the change being just as material. That inconsistency deserves a real look at its fiscal impact, not just a correction of the underlying numbers. I raised these specific patterns and parcel examples directly with Finance Director Hodnett on August 16th and have not yet received a response. Understandable, considering her current time crunch from recently receiving unanticipated DOR values. I also want to call out a point important to your discussion: special assessments are not a general tax. They are tied by law to a measurable, proportional benefit received by the parcel being assessed. That means they are not an appropriate lever for the Commission to use the way you might use a general fund policy choice, to reward one category of development or cushion another. Whatever the Commission's intentions around housing supply or redevelopment, those goals belong in the tools built for them. They shouldn't be delivered as a side effect of an assessment schedule that happens to undercharge some parcels because of an error, or because a rezoning discount was never checked against actual benefit received. I have never gotten the impression that this Commission desires to assign a proportional benefit premium to our modular, manufactured, or mobile home residents. Yet that is the practical effect of adopting these schedules as written, at the same time formerly R-O market-rate multifamily parcels reclassified R-(X) under the UDC update are receiving substantial new bill reductions. Icon at Ferguson Farms and Hillcrest, for example, are set to receive bill reductions of roughly $17,000 and $69,000 respectively, as a direct result of the R-O to R-C reclassification, while mobile home parks that meet the same cap criteria remain either fully billed or inconsistently capped depending on which error happened to affect their parcel. If that outcome is intended, I believe it deserves to be stated as a finding on the record, not adopted quietly inside a routine schedule resolution. If it is not intended, and I don't believe it is, then before this list goes to the County with its winners and losers already assigned, the errors need to be corrected. I'd ask the Commission to direct the city manager to confirm the timeline by which these schedules must be certified to the County, identify whether any window remains to correct known errors before that deadline, and commit to an audit of the FY26 and FY27 schedules, including whether similar errors affected prior fiscal years and what remedy is available to affected owners. I'm glad to make my full analysis available to City staff to help that move faster than starting from scratch. Thank you for your time and consideration on a night with a full agenda. With gratitude, Emily Talago Dear Mayor and Commissioners, Thank you for receiving my previous comments on the City's budget this summer. It's a tough item, and I really wish the state legislature would stop meddling with local budgets. But I understand what they're trying to do: hold some guardrails in place to protect taxpayers from the exact thing the City is doing with the general fund right now. Because as we see in this instance, even though the City doesn't need the additional four mills to balance this budget, the recommendation is to levy them anyway, on the theory that if we don't lock in the higher tax base now, we risk coming up short on the room to raise total taxes levied for inflation in future years. Fair enough. The staff memo for this item suggested that even after certified values were incorporated, and even after staff reduced ongoing expenditures and built in a modest level of annual operating savings, the six-year forecast still didn't maintain the City's 16.67% minimum General Fund reserve throughout the period. I want to thank the commissioners who were responsive in providing some additional detail on how the City plans to get there. It's helpful to understand that the fund is otherwise performing as intended, with ongoing revenues covering core operating expenditures and a margin of roughly $1 to $2 million a year. As I stated repeatedly in my budget public comments, the competition for that general fund margin is not okay, and I wasn't being hyperbolic when I said so. When you take that thin margin and model what it looks like to allocate roughly $2 million a year in recurring expenses outside core services, Community Housing, Streamline, and HRDC, year over year, even with the recommended additional four mills, the General Fund is still projected to fall below that minimum reserve requirement by 2032, if I'm understanding the numbers correctly. The state wants Montana cities to go to their voters when they want to spend money on something outside general fund core services, and the legislature is doubling down on forcing exactly that. I think it would be worth the Commission's time to see the alternative model: what happens if the City keeps the new fire and police positions in the forecast, but removes the non-core commitments, do we still end up below the reserve minimum in 2032? That comparison would tell you a great deal about what is actually driving the six-year decline, rather than treating tonight's mill levy as the only variable in that story. This is where a policy decision, for example, to remit background market appreciation from URD budgets back to the general fund, could be operative. I want to be clear that I'm not saying the City shouldn't fund housing, Streamline, or HRDC. It seems to me that investment in those things has both direct and indirect impact on the work our general fund otherwise supports. But we need to get those commitments a dedicated revenue stream of their own. We could try the ballot again, a tough hill to climb, but not insurmountable with the right messaging about what it actually costs the general fund when the City doesn't support these services, or we could rally behind the same drum other Montana cities are beating in Helena, pushing for local option sales or tourism tax authority. It isn't right to ask our community to choose between emergency services and proactive social support services. That's a false choice, and I don't think this Commission should be forced into presenting it as one. Again, thank you for your time and consideration. With gratitude, Emily Talago