Economic and Revenue Forecast Council meeting of 8/7/2026

Good afternoon, the Friday, August 7th, 2026. Today is Friday, August 7th, 2026, and this meeting of the Economic and Revenue Forecast Council will come to order.

I'm Dan Strauss, Chair of the Economic and Revenue Forecast Council.

I'm here today with my colleagues, and I'll call roll here.

Council President Hollingsworth?

Present.

Deputy Director of City Operations and Forecast Council Vice President- Vice Chair Mark Ellerbrook?

Here.

City Finance Director Dwight Dively?

Here.

Councilmember Strauss?

Here.

We have four present and a quorum here.

So we are also joined today by the staff from the Economic and Revenue Forecast, as well as representatives from the City Budget Office, and the City Council's central staff is also here somewhere.

They'll be here momentarily.

The main purpose of today's meeting is for the Forecast Council to receive and review the updated Economic and Revenue Forecasts.

This forecast is particularly important because it will serve as the basis for the Mayor's upcoming proposed budget.

City budgets always legally must be balanced, and so the Mayor's proposed spending will be directly affected by the forecast in which we receive today.

City Council will then begin its review of the proposed budget, and we, the Forecast Council, are scheduled to receive a final revenue forecast for the year on Friday, October 16th.

This October forecast will set the stage for the City Council's budget deliberations and determine the total resources to be appropriated through that process.

Before moving on to the forecast presentation, let's begin by formally adopting the agenda for today's meeting.

A copy of the agenda has been circulated to members and is available online at the Forecast Office website.

I move to adopt the agenda.

Is there a second?

Second.

Second.

Thank you.

It has been moved and seconded to adopt the agenda Today's agenda is before the Forecast Council.

This is the opportunity for members to amend the agenda to add or remove an item.

Are there any proposed amendments or removals?

Thank you.

If there are no objections, today's agenda will be adopted.

Hearing no objection, today's agenda is adopted.

Moving on to item one, which is the approval of the minutes from the April 10th, 2026 meeting.

A copy of the minutes from the April 10th meeting of the Forecast Council have been circulated to the members and posted on the website.

of the forecast office.

I move and seek a second for the approval of the minutes.

Second.

It has been moved and seconded to approve the minutes from our last meeting.

If there are no objections, the minutes will be approved.

Hearing no objections, the minutes are approved.

Now, let's jump right into why we're here.

We're going to move right into item two, which is the presentation of the August 2026 economic and revenue forecasts and the recommendations of the Office of economic and revenue forecasts regarding 2026, 2027, and 2028 revenue forecasts.

Moving into this agenda item, the Forecast Office will present these revised forecasts for this year, next year, and 2028. Why this is important is because we are at the beginning of our biennial budget process, so not only do we have to true up this year, we are setting the budget for 27 and 28. This forecast updates those forecasts.

Today's presentation will be led by staff from the City's Independent Office of Economic and Revenue Forecasts.

And as a reminder to the public, this office is similar to the Independent Forecasting Offices operating in King County and at Washington State, with the main purpose to increase transparency and accountability around the City's revenue forecasting process and to ensure that there is no political influence on the forecasts themselves.

To ensure the Forecast Council is fully informed and to have full range of questions addressed, staff from City Council Central Staff and City Budget Office also participate in this briefing.

The staff from the City Budget Office is also present today to provide briefing regarding the revenues still within the purview of the Budget Office.

And so this, the Forecast Office will now present The background, Director Duras, I always appreciate that there's a long lead in with our current economic situation while everyone's on pins and needles to know how much money we received or lost.

But it is really important that first section that you always present because So having this three times a year gives us a good snapshot of what's changed since the last time we met.

And so we'll turn it over to you to run through your presentation.

All I ask is that before you move from our economic environment into the forecast options that we pause, ask and answer any questions there.

Over to you, Director Duras.

Welcome.

And the committee table would like to introduce themselves.

Just for the record, we all know you.

Really appreciate all the work you do, but maybe a round of introductions and then jump right into the presentation.

And colleagues, if you do have questions along the way, please feel free to ask them, just noting that we are starting a half an hour late because council chambers were unavailable.

Yeah.

Thank you, Chair Strauss.

Good afternoon, Forecast Council members.

For the record, my name is Yandras, interim director and chief economist at the Office of Economic and Revenue Forecasts.

Good afternoon, everybody.

This is Sean Thompson.

I work with the Office of Economic Rarity Forecast as well.

Good afternoon.

Joe Russell, City Budget Office.

Good afternoon.

Alexandria Zang, economist with the City Budget Office.

Okay, so which one is it again?

There we go.

All right, so let's dive into it.

So as always, we are first going to look at the economic development since last forecast.

The main reason why we are spending considerable amount of time on that is the way how they recommend you forecast are developed.

It's a two-state process.

In the first step, we are taking the US forecast as a main input and using it to develop the regional economic forecast.

And then that regional economic forecast is used as a main input to develop the revenue forecast for those revenue streams which are driven by the economy, business and occupation tax, sales tax, payroll expense tax, utility taxes, and all sorts of other revenue streams.

In recent months, the Iran conflict has been shaping the outlook quite considerably.

It has created notable headwinds.

The chart here shows the impact of that war on oil and gas prices in the Seattle area.

There was a large spike in March, lots of ups and downs, lots of uncertainty.

Oil prices have come down recently but there is still very high uncertainty around the outlook.

Things are very hard to predict and so that adds to overall uncertainty that was already present there.

Despite all that uncertainty, financial markets have in general performed quite remarkably.

There was a about 9% drop after the war started, but then S&P 500, as you can see in this chart, recovered.

Those red dots show the points at which we were delivering forecasts.

So you can also see that last year there was similar sort of a situation where The April forecast came right after tariffs were announced.

Things looked better by August, improved even further by October.

Then again with the Iran war, things turned down.

The outlook was more pessimistic in April.

But since then, in general, the economy has kind of muddled through.

Despite all those tailwinds, the economy continues to grow at a solid pace.

That said, there are notable risks because of the high concentration of crows, whether it's looking at the investment, looking at consumer spending, Looking at the SAP 500 index there is a lot essentially that's hanging on the outcome of how the AI build out and the investment in AI how that will affect the economy and we can talk a little bit more

And Jan, before you move on to that next slide, I'll just make one comment.

You note here April 10th as being a data point on this chart.

I think that's important just because when you are pulling your information to provide us these forecasts, you're doing this the weeks ahead of this meeting, and this graph clearly describes that we were in a a stock market downturn while you were creating those forecasts last time around.

So I just, for the viewing public, all 150,000 people watching this program right now, I just wanted to note that because it's important context for this whole conversation.

There is always that issue that by the time the forecast is delivered some of the input data is already stale and so it's especially challenging in the environment where things change week to week, day to day.

Looking a little bit at the main economic data for the region and that's the employment data.

This chart here compares how the regional economy fares relative to the US.

The top two bars that are labeled total non-farm are showing the change in overall employment in the first six months of 2026 for the US.

That's a blue bar, roughly a slightly less than 0.2% year-over-year increase in the job numbers for Seattle area we have seen a decline almost half a percent decline year over year in the first half of 2026 and then those bars below show the decomposition by industry so essentially show which of the industries have have been behind the significant decline in the Seattle metro area and here I want to stress that this is really Seattle metro area, not Seattle City, but what's called Seattle Metropolitan Division, which means King and Snohomish counties.

That's the data that we use to develop that economic forecast because that's the data that's released on a regular basis relatively little delay it's released monthly there is some data on employment by city but it's coming much less often I'll talk a little bit about that in a couple of slides Here again, this is the region as a whole, as you can see.

Layoffs in the tech sector have led to a significant amount of job losses in the information sector.

The higher interest rates have also created the headwinds for the real estate industry that's under financial activities here.

There are ongoing effects of tariffs which are pulling down wholesale and retail trade.

Those are the primary sectors behind those declines that we are seeing year over year in the region.

Turning to the outlook, first looking again at the US as a whole, that's the forecast that we get from S&P Global and from Moody's Analytics.

The charts here show the average forecast from those two companies.

The main idea here is to hedge the risk in terms one of those forecasts turns out to be either too optimistic or too pessimistic.

The average is an attempt to balance it out.

the line focusing here on the panel on the left labeled CPIU that shows the expected year-over-year inflation back in March.

It shows the baseline and the pessimistic outlook.

Since then, the oil prices have gone up and stayed higher for longer than expected and so the inflation has actually has actually increased more in line with that pessimistic scenario.

So we have seen a 4%, roughly 4% year over year change in the US inflation.

It's expected to stay elevated for the rest of the year before it comes down.

Now under the pessimistic forecast, again, lots of uncertainty around where things will go around the Iran conflict.

In the pessimistic, more pessimistic scenario, there is a more pronounced effect on inflation and it would peak somewhere around 4.5%.

Not anywhere as high as in 2022 but a significant increase compared to where the inflation was last year and where it was expected to head Were it not for again the Iran war The chart on the panel on the right side labeled Federal Funds Effective Rate shows the interest rate that Fed is using as its primary tool for a monetary policy.

Again, rewinding a little bit back to what things look like in March, it was and the general belief was that the Fed will continue with easing to support the economy.

The labor market was in the weak spot and it looked like that's the side of a dual mandate that it will have to focus more on.

because of the rising inflation.

The outlook has changed considerably, and that red line labeled July 2026 baseline shows that the interest rates are now expected to stay high, no rate cuts throughout the year.

If anything, financial markets are actually pricing an increase.

There is a significant probability of at least one rate hike by the end of the year.

as of this morning, it's a 76% chance that we are going to see at least 1.25 percentage point hike by the end of this year, potentially even to and that has implications for the outlook, for the economic activity.

Long-term interest rates, mortgage rates, for example, are not directly linked to federal funds rate, but there are some factors that are driving them in the same direction, higher inflation, higher uncertainty, in general, push those long interest rates up.

The mortgage rate has gone from roughly 6% in early March to 6.7% right now.

And that has a considerable impact on things like trade revenues that we will get to when we are talking about the updated outlook for that revenue stream.

So that's not so great news.

The slightly better news is that, again, the economy has kind of muddled through.

The change in the real GDP growth is relatively minor.

Both S&P Global and Moody's Analytics expect 2% year-over-year growth rate this year and the next year.

In addition to that, in a more broader survey of economists, the Wall Street Journal July survey of economists conducted in July showed that the perceived probability of a recession in the next 12 months has come down.

So from roughly 33% in April down to about 25%.

That was sometime in mid-July before additional flare-ups in Iran, flare-ups of hostilities in Iran.

Nevertheless, it's somewhere, let's say, around 25 to 30% chance of recession next year.

That's where most economies would probably put it.

And so overall, the baseline scenario, baseline path, that 2% growth is the more likely outcome Nevertheless, on the panel on the right side showing the employment change, so year-over-year growth in US employment shows that the expectations are that very few jobs will be created.

There has been a slowdown on both the supply and the demand side in the labor market in the US.

Slightly harder to see, but the current forecast is a little bit above compared to the March forecast.

The darker red line is just a tiny bit above the employment forecast from March.

That's the result of a couple of months of good news up until this morning where the job numbers came significantly below expectations and total payroll actually declined months over months.

Financial markets did not react by dropping, they actually went up.

So again, modeling through, that's how this would be described.

There is that AI investment that's driving again a lot of the growth, the wealth effects, Higher stock price valuations are supporting the spending, especially from the higher income families.

In addition, the tax cuts have provided some buffer against those price increases that we have seen as a result of higher oil prices.

Again, a lot of risk here because of how concentrated that growth is.

The pessimistic scenario, the current pessimistic scenario essentially assumes that those disruptions to the oil prices and the following impact on inflation will lead to consumer and household and businesses spending much less.

That will lead to layoffs.

potentially coupled with the sale-off in the stock market sell-off where the investment in AI does not turn out to be as profitable as the investors are currently expecting.

All that would contribute to recession starting in 2027, second half of 26, going into 2027, lasting through the end of next year.

so that's a pessimistic scenario and so we have those baseline pessimistic scenarios there is an optimistic one for in the interest of time we're not going through that but we are developing three forecasts for revenues the baseline the pessimistic and the optimistic one they are available on our website and we have shared that with the staff We'll be making recommendations at the end regarding the adoptions of one of those.

Again, these are the main inputs for the regional economic forecast and consequently those revenue forecasts.

So turning to the outlook for the region and looking quickly at the inflation, similar sort of changes as in the US forecast, higher oil prices than expected led to higher inflation that was initially anticipated, somewhere around 4.5% throughout this year, over 5% in the case of a current pessimistic scenario.

mirroring those changes in the forecast for the US.

When it comes to the employment, There are some additional factors, some that have contributed to the changes.

The Employment Security Department regularly revises employment numbers, and it did that this time going back to 2023. The employment numbers were revised down for 2023 and 2024 and slightly up for 2025. So what that did mechanically is that even if you are looking back from the dotted line so that historical data we are currently where the dotted line is to the right we have a forecast to the left we have the historical data the red line is not aligned with the previous one it shows less of a growth in 2024 less of a decline in 2025 some small declines in employment numbers last year but not as big as we were presenting in march again that's the result of those revisions to the historical data that the ESD does regularly in this particular case.

It was kind of asymmetric effect.

Beyond that, you can see that looking at the forecast going to the right of the dotted line, the changes are really marginal.

There is slightly better growth and slightly higher growth predicted in the employment as a result of more of a momentum.

So those slightly smaller declines in 2025 means that there will be smaller job losses throughout 2026. Nevertheless, we do predict that the regional economy will end the current year with job losses.

before it starts to grow again.

The growth in 2027 is however minor, only 0.4% year over year increase following roughly 0.3% decline this year.

Pessimistic scenarios, again, the one where a recession would occur would lead to meaningful job losses, about 34,000 fewer jobs between end of 25 and mid-2027.

Those job losses would be recovered sometime at the end of 2028. So again, just to remind the public that this is King and Snohomish counties, that's the main input that we are using in the economic regional forecast because that's the data that we have and we We don't really receive updates on the economic situation on the city level.

They occur with a significant lag and only once per year.

In particular, last month the Puget Sound Regional Council has released city level employment estimates for March 2025. So they do it once a year in July for March of a previous year.

The most recent data is for March 2025. That dataset is looking at individual cities within region, within King County, and provides estimates for total employment.

The recent data shows that Seattle has lost about 18,000 jobs between March 24 and March 2025. One thing to note here is that this is not really showing the impact of those large layoffs that have been announced recently by Amazon, Microsoft and Meta platforms.

Even those that were announced in 2025 will only show up show up next year and the one after that.

So we are going to see the full impact only in summer 2028 when the data for March 2027 is released by the Puget Sound Regional Council.

So some reason to believe that those red bars are going and there are some significant headwinds there and unless some jobs are created elsewhere in the economy, we are going to see additional year-over-year declines in the total employment.

Thank you, Director Duras.

Before we move on there, am I reading this correctly with the employment numbers from 2020 and then 2021?

Looks like we lost a lot of employees and then we rehired them.

Is that what happened?

Okay, so the 2020 and 2021 Again, the timing here is a little bit intuitive.

The March 2020 is essentially the point right before the pandemic.

If you remember what was happening back in March, the lockdowns only occurred sometime later in the month, first half of a month.

did not see any impact on pandemic yet.

And so the data that was released for March 2020 is showing minimal impact of COVID on employment numbers.

Then the full impact or the brunt of it was in the release for March 2021. So that showed what happened throughout the year 2020. and early 2021. And so those two big drops, those two big bars, they are for March 2021 and show the change between March 20 and March 21. And those are the significant job losses that have then over time The economy has recovered slowly but overall there wasn't any meaningful growth on the regional level.

We are still hovering somewhere slightly below the total pre-pandemic numbers and for City of Seattle we are actually significantly below.

There was a significant decline in total employment.

Yeah, this is a really helpful chart because it tells the story of the 2008 recession, then the 10 years of highest...

We were the fastest-growing city in the nation for those 10 years, which gave us a lot of one-time funds that we started funding ongoing programs with, which is part of how we got to a structural budget deficit.

This is just really helpful to show that growth.

We then lost a lot of jobs in the pandemic and regained them.

But then from there, we had a short growth looks like other cities in King County grew faster, and since then, other cities in King County are about flat, but we are losing jobs.

we've lost 18,000 jobs between 25 and 26?

24 and 25.

So again, last year for which we have the data is March 25, yeah, and it's 18,000.

That red bar at the very end shows about 3% decline.

That represents about 18,000 jobs in Seattle.

Thank you.

Was my summary essentially what you see as well?

Yeah, yeah.

Thank you.

I think it's just very descriptive of how did we get to where we are today and what are we doing about it?

So there is a little bit more detail in the data that was released essentially showing again the decomposition by industry showing where those lower job numbers are coming from how individual industries fared between March 20 and March 25. Again, March 20 is right before pandemic and March 2025, that's more than a year ago, but that's most recent data that we have.

The total change for Seattle is is somewhere around 25,000 jobs lost between March 20 and March 25. King County as a whole added about 21,000 jobs during the same period.

The losses in Seattle are rather broad-based.

With the exception of private education and health services and government, most other sectors have declined some more so than others.

Information sector declined notably.

That's again not really those recent layoffs.

There was one round of layoffs somewhere in 20, 23, but the impact of 25 and 26 is not here.

Trade and professional businesses, same sort of thing.

They declined about as much as the information sector.

One more thing to note here, the data, the way how it's assembled and how it's constructed does not allow to separate out the trade sector from professional and business services, there was reclassification of some activities, non-store retailers, e-commerce essentially was moved around and that moved a significant number of jobs between those two categories.

So the chart shows them as a combined single trade plus professional and business services category here.

Construction sector, obviously there's significantly less demand for office space.

Higher interest rate make financing harder.

Manufacturing has not really benefited from higher interest rates.

There wasn't any sort of construction boom that would follow.

And so we are again seeing fewer jobs than in 2020. So that's the time for pause now.

Happy to take any questions regarding economic situation and outlook.

Thank you.

Colleagues, questions on the economic environment in which we are in?

Seeing none.

I think we're all just pins and needles.

Did we lose?

Did we win?

Where are we at today?

Right.

So there are a lot of crosswinds here.

Before we look at the numbers, just to again remind members of the public that are maybe not watching it every time or forgot since last time we were presenting it.

We are now in the middle of 2026, but for some revenue streams, we have not even seen half of all the annual revenues coming in.

Overall, it's about a third of general fund revenues that we would get by this point but it significantly varies by the revenue stream and that chart on the right shows how between the April and the August forecast we receive additional information in form of tax returns but even when we get to the October forecast and overall Amount of for some revenues it's less than half of the revenues received for business occupation tax for payroll expense tax It's again not not even a half that we get for real estate excise tax that those returns are coming With less of a delay similarly for for utility taxes So what that means is that the current forecast is essentially bailed on when it comes to main revenue streams.

It's built on the first five months of sales tax revenue data and fully incorporates the first quarter business and occupation returns.

The restructure has shifted some of those payments towards later of the year and the charts incorporates the impact of that, the impact of a 2 million deduction that kind of postponed some of the payments towards a later part of the year.

At this point there is about 90% of Q2 filings already in but it's not fully incorporated in that forecast again given the delay between when we have the data available how much time it takes to update the forecast and to but we seem to be trending roughly in line with the business and occupation tax forecast.

Overall, and I'll speak to that in just a minute, overall we have sent out a second quarter revenue report and it's available on our website.

It shows that overall the general fund is only slightly below where we were expecting it to be by the end of second quarter, less than a million, about 0.12%.

excluding grants and fund balance transfers due to technical reasons the general fund is actually slightly above 7.5 million or 1.2 percent higher than anticipated again very significantly by the revenue stream and We are now getting to those additional factors beyond changes in the economic environment.

There are a lot of crosswinds here.

The revenue collection to date has significantly benefited from the ESSB 5814 which reclassified some activities from service to retail and essentially expanding the tax base for the sales tax.

That's clearly visible in those last five set of bars starting January 2026. The year-over-year growth rate for sales tax is on average about 10%.

There is a significant spike in March, averaging those couple of months.

It's about 10% year over year increase.

It's primarily information and professional businesses services sectors.

They have contributed about 5.6% to the overall growth.

So those are the activities that were again reclassified from service to retail.

Those are under what's labeled in the chart as rest of industries.

Those purple bars that are showing significant year-over-year growth.

Trade has contributed about 2.5%, leisure and hospitality minor positive contribution 0.7%.

For construction sector, we are continuing to see declines, but much smaller.

If you look at those yellow bars, the declines have kind of flattened out compared to what we were seeing two years, three years ago.

So that's essentially those large increase in the sales tax are essentially what's driving the majority of the revision in the forecast here.

It's a large table with lots of numbers.

Looking first at the very bottom row, the total general fund without grants and transfers.

and specifically looking at the change for 2026 revenues it's 24.5 million to the plus side and looking up at those individual streams 19.9 so almost 20 million is coming from additional sales tax revenues again we have seen significant increase year over year it was more it was actually higher growth than we were predicting Our forecast by construction is in general tends to be conservative and so we are seeing more revenues from sales tax than predicted It was about 4.5 million for the first half of a year Extending it to the rest of a year that would essentially bring it somewhere 10 for a regular and optional sales tax In addition, we have seen some non-current payments about 5 million of those so that also explains why there is less of an increase predicted for 2027 for sales tax revenues and also less of an increase predicted for 2028 revenues.

So sales tax overall added about 48 billion over the three years.

That's about 5%.

The overall year over year growth here between 2025 and 2026 is quite significant.

Primarily again those legislative changes ESB 5814 and then the new Public safety sales tax the 0.1% new tax that's adding about 4 million they combined add to a significant growth and so for total general fund without grants and transfers it's a 10.6 year-over-year growth this year followed by probably by 3.6% next year and then 4.3% the year after that.

Again, a lot of it coming from a sales tax.

Smaller revisions to the business and occupation tax.

To the downside, that has to do with the changes in the composition of employment, incorporating the impact of the layoffs, incorporating the higher interest rates that are expected to slow down the economic activity.

and there is an asymmetric effect of 58-14 on sales tax and business and occupation tax.

The reclassification leads to lower business and occupation tax revenue, so as a result of higher predicted revenues for sales tax and mechanically have actually smaller business and occupation tax revenues.

That said, overall, the forecast, as I said, the changes are smaller here because we have been more successful.

It appears at this point that we have been more successful predicting the impact on business and occupation tax rather than sales tax.

The caveat here is that we only have first quarter in and about 90% of a second quarter in.

There is some underlying uncertainty about how things are going to look a couple of months from now.

and I'll hand it over to Sean to talk about private utility taxes.

Thank you, Jan.

Yes, so private utility taxes, which is composed of cable, telephone, natural gas, steam, and I believe sold waste as well, that has been given a slight revision downward primarily caused by cable, telephone, and steam revenues for the most recent year or most recent quarter.

As a result, or I should say that those tax revenue streams have very concentrated tax bases, so they can be quite volatile.

For example, STEAM is primarily, their customer base is most buildings within downtown, so it can be really sensitive to even one building going off of STEAM, for example.

There were some revisions in natural gas.

It was due to an improved rate increase for the state and it was roughly about 14% increase.

That raises the base for next year and raises overall forecast.

Some upside risk with that as well is that there is another planned rate increase about the same amount, but it might be revised downward when it's approved.

But overall private utilities are slightly dampened from the April forecast mostly driven by smaller revisions and these small tax revenue streams as a result in a 5.8 million reduction across the last three years compared to April.

Back to CBO.

Thanks, Joan.

I'll take property tax.

So property tax in this table includes both the city's general expense property tax, as well as the city's share of the EMS Medic One levy.

We see quite a bit of a bump in 2027 and 2028. A small share of that is due to upper divisions of new construction in Seattle.

which is garnering us a bit more collections on our general expense property tax, but most of it is actually driven by the EMS levy.

And so just to briefly explain what's going on behind the scenes there, So the tax rate on the county levy is determined by total county collection spread over the tax base, which is total King County assessed value.

The county's expectation of their AV in their most recent forecast, which is July, was actually revised pretty significantly downward compared to March.

that means that that actually pushes the tax rate up, which ends up benefiting the city.

On top of that, given the high, so the city shares calculated using the overall tax rate and the city's expectation of our assessed value.

And so our expectation of assessed value actually went up.

So both, So the movement in RRAV and the King County expectations are both benefiting how much we're collecting from the U.S. levy.

Utility tax public, so this includes tax on utility revenues from electricity, water, drainage, wastewater, solid waste, and tonnage.

So often those pieces move up and down within this category.

On net, we can see that it's pretty stable in 27, 28. 26 was revised a little bit upward due to actuals performing better than expectations, particularly with water and electricity.

And then other city taxes comprises several small, fairly small city taxes that sum up to about 16 million per year.

This was revised down a little bit for 26 due to actuals actually performing a little bit worse for leasehold excise tax, as well as TNC tax.

which has not been faring too well ever since the pandemic actually given not only low demand but also low supply of drivers.

And I will pass it to Joe.

I'll speak to the parking meters line here in this table.

This line is composed essentially of two revenue streams.

One is what you pay in the parking meters on the street.

The other is what we call meter hooding revenues, and that's kind of an antiquated term for when you pay to reserve spots that are normally paid parking.

So the parking meters forecast is down a bit.

We did see a rate adjustment, one of the normal rate adjustments during the year back in the second week of May.

The rates were adjusted a little higher than previously expected in the April forecast, but we continue to see transactions underperforming.

So something of a wash there in terms of the parking meter forecast.

The meter hooding fees have been adjusted upwards slightly.

The first half of the year, those revenues have come in stronger than we had previously anticipated.

So that forecast is responsible for some of the bump you see in 27-28.

Looking at the next row, which is labeled court fines here, this is composed of quite a few different small fines that the city imposes.

The vast majority of what we see in this line is actually parking citations.

In the April forecast, there was quite a bit of change to this revenue stream.

There have been depressed citations from parking enforcement starting in late November.

A lot of that is due to various labor issues.

Some of that is into 26. We've seen lower citations due to some changes in state law that limit license plate readers, the use of that technology.

So that was incorporated into the April forecast, but it seems now that revenues in 26 are, the citation volumes rather, in 26 are overperforming what we, the relatively conservative forecast we had in April.

So that's responsible for the upward adjustment there, and that flows through into the out years as well.

So we're seeing a recovery in those citations that's closer to what we experienced earlier in 2025, though we're not quite there yet, certainly, but beating our April forecast.

Alex, you want to speak to the next row there?

Yeah, so licenses, permits, interest income, and other, that's a mouthful.

Most of that is fee revenue from licenses and permits.

Some of it is interest income, which is interest earnings on the general fund fund balance.

And so in 2026, there's about a $2 million revision upward due to both actually some FIFA funding as well as as well as the network company fee actually on app-based delivery.

That was effective last year, but tax collections only started this year.

And so we will essentially collect about two years worth of revenue this year from that fee.

In the out years for 27-28, we see a bit of a bump upward actually due to interest income.

The expectation for short-term treasury yields has gone up, mostly given the expectation that the Fed will not move to cut rates and might even hike them this year.

Revenue from other public entities is composed mainly of transfers that the city receives from the state.

Under state law, certain state revenues are shared with counties and municipalities.

The change we see here is driven by two different state shared revenues, mainly from the liquor excise tax and somewhat from the marijuana excise tax.

The state publishes growth factors for the outlook for these shared revenues, and there has been an update subsequent to the April forecast and the outlook for the liquor excise tax revenues as well as the marijuana excise tax revenues were downgraded since the April forecast.

So that is responsible for the downgrade of about $1.2 million over the three-year period in this table.

And then service charges and reimbursements.

A lot of the revenues that go into this category are internal service charges.

Revenues that departments get for their services to other departments.

In 2026, the 1.7 million actually points to some revenue to the law department that actually was shifted from 25 to 26 in 27 and 28. So again, these are various interdepartmental charges that have been moving up and down.

So on net, we are assuming an increase to those charges overall.

and then grants in 2026, the 18.3 million is completely entirely from the mid-year supplemental as well as more FIFA funding, several million in FIFA funding.

In 27, 28, these are revised expectations for grants that are now assumed to be ongoing into the biennium.

And then finally, fund balance transfers, this negative one million is simply a correction of an error to the payroll expense tax transfer, which is the bulk of this category.

Alright, so overall it's 59.4 million more over three years.

That's roughly 1.1% more in revenues predicted for those three years for the general fund.

Moving to the non-general fund revenues.

Yeah, yeah.

Director, just before we move on, I wanted to note in the earlier part of the presentation, you noted that we were muddling through our economy.

We've seen this for the last several years of slow or there was one moment negative growth that we were concerned with.

In here, we have $59 million over three years, which is a lot of money.

But in the context of our city's budget and our general when we receive these reports every three times a year.

In the past, when we've been in our high growth period, what were our changes at that point?

Was it twice this, three times this, a half of this?

What are we seeing generally over the course of time here?

yeah so again 59 million is a lot but not out of if you add up the three years 1.8 1.8 1.9 billion so it's out of roughly 6 billion so again just 1.1 percent so that the small sort of revision in the grand scale there were definitely much larger revisions during Covid before that for the 10 years before that What was usually happening is that the growth was exceeding expectations during the construction boom, the tech sector boom between 2010 and 2019. The forecast revisions were up because of those changes in better outlook.

Here a lot of it is again driven by changes due to the legislation, not really big changes in the economic outlook, which again did not change much kind of still.

So if we had not had these legislative changes, we might be at a 0% increase rather than a...

Yeah, so it would be tough without those additional revenues in sales tax, additional revenues in business occupation tax, yes.

And just highlighting again that this positive news is not necessarily from economic growth, rather from changes in law.

Yeah, and the way how we were assuming a more conservative, we were taking a more conservative approach and adding those revenues.

Well, the actual revenues exceeded our expectations, or additional revenues from new sales tax has exceeded our expectations, and that's...

Thank you, and my last compliments to Joe.

We have gotten over the bow wake of our parking meter changes where we weren't charging enough, where our fines were actually...

less expensive than not paying for parking.

We now have more appropriate fines, and we are rolling paid parking out in more places.

Just wanted to note, this is the first time we've been able to see us getting back into the black, and that's not because of the analysis you provide, but rather the policy that we make here.

And so it's good to see that that is stabilizing.

So this is the last time I'll bring up parking meters.

Joe, thank you for all your work.

Very welcome.

Thank you.

Moving on to the non-journal fund revenues, the largest revisions are as usually to the payroll expense tax that has to do a lot with the underlying tax base and the factors driving it.

Whenever there is a change in the outlook for stock prices, there is a significant, usually significant change in the outlook for this revenue stream.

This year, we also have the impact of those layoffs in the tax sector affecting the outlook for payroll expense tax.

You can see there is a year-over-year decline between 25 and 26, again layoffs, but largely offset by the improved outlook since April that added about 18 million this year, similar amounts next to for a total change of 57.7 million over the three years.

Handing it over to interest income for this fund?

Yeah, so again this table is a mix of forecasts that are forecasted by the Forecast Office and by City Budget Office, so we're going to ping-pong a little bit here, but the interest income on the payroll expense tax follows similar underlying trends to the interest income on the general fund in that the forecast is up for interest earnings on this fund, generally because of the higher expected yields to treasury bonds, which is the main investment vehicle for these fund balances.

When it comes to rate the impact of the higher interest rate is the opposite.

As I mentioned earlier, the expectations are now that the Fed will not cut the interest rates, mortgage rates have gone up, so there was also change at the lower end of the yield curve.

There is an immediate impact on the number of homes that are sold.

They are becoming less affordable with higher mortgage rates.

In addition, we have that effect of higher uncertainty and the layoffs in the tech sector, which are making some buyers most likely very hesitant about making a bigger purchase.

So that has resulted in revision down for REIT, overall about 23 million over three years.

And then for the admissions tax, slightly smaller revenues this year, slightly larger revenues in the next two, overall very minor change over three years.

The sweetened beverage tax, we have revised downward a total of $3.8 million across the three-year period.

We have seen actual revenues coming in lower in the first quarter of this year, which is an adjustment that bleeds through into the other years of this model and expected revenues.

There was also a downward revision to population growth estimates for the region in this forecast.

is one of the inputs that we use to forecast this revenue stream.

So that also composes a downward impact on this revenue stream.

I will also add that in 26, we had assumed a bump from World Cup activity We still assume some bump.

We have softened that increase in this revenue forecast based on very early data on tourist activity.

We don't have sales tax information for the World Cup period as yet, but some just sort of peripheral data sources suggest maybe softening that assumption.

So we have in 26.

As for short-term rental tax, the story is similar.

In 2026, that reduction cascades through 27 to 28 a little bit.

Actuals have been a little bit weaker than forecasted.

And then on top of that, related to the World Cup effect, hotel revenue and occupancy have been revised notably down.

or at least the outlook for that for the rest of 2026. And so we actually don't have June or July actuals for short-term rental tax, but there are definitely some indications that we need to temper our expectations about World Cup.

Alright, the next line is a new one.

Our office took over forecasting for affordable housing sales tax.

That revenue is capped by state.

It's essentially a transfer of some share of a sales tax that would otherwise go to the state and hovers around 4.4.

That's where we are seeing it in the next couple of years due to essentially that cap and the mechanics for these tax work.

The line below, transportation benefit district sales tax, that one, unless it's renewed, it ends in first quarter of 2027, so that's why there is a big drop in 2027, it's only one quarter of revenues, and then nothing for 2028. There is a proposal for this to be renewed at 0.3% rate, that would generate an additional 19.6.3 million in 27 and about 125.3 in 2028. I'll hand it over again to Joe.

Yeah, also part of the Seattle Transit Benefit District Fund is a vehicle license fee.

That is the $50 fee you pay when you renew your car tabs.

We have revised this forecast down by 5.5 million across the three-year period.

Revenues so far in 26 are lower than expected, and so that is is part of what's depressing the outlook for these revenues.

The reasons for that are, frankly, a little bit difficult to discern at this moment.

25 may have been slightly anomalous in that there were federal tax credits expiring for vehicle purchases, There may have been some vehicle purchasing to get ahead of tariff effects, but there may also be some impact of how the Department of Licensing reminds you to renew your tabs.

That changed about a year ago in August of 2025, and so we are theorizing that potentially there is some impact in folks delaying or maybe even foregoing renewing tabs.

And so there's a behavioral component here that is possibly at play.

You'll also see a larger downward revision in 2027 of 3.2 million.

and frankly that is due to a recalibration of the model that had previously been picking up quite a large bump in this revenue stream in 2027. We have been in conversation with the state's forecasting office and their outlook for vehicle registrations over this time period and have mostly eliminated that bump in 27 in order to bring ourselves, our modeling into alignment with their outlook.

And so that leads to quite a revision in the 27 forecast.

for commercial parking tax.

There's a bit of a downward revision in 2026. The reasons are twofold.

One is actuals are lagging forecast just a little bit.

The other is that the outlook for leisure and hospitality, which is trying to capture economic activity, especially downtown, is weaker in 2026, presumably in part, at least in part because of higher inflation expectations.

But that outlook does bounce back in 27 to 28. So on net, there is a $1.5 million gain over the three years.

And then the final row of this table is labeled automatic traffic safety cameras.

This is a row that aligns to the ATSC fund, and it is composed of essentially five different traffic camera types.

I will speak to each year individually.

Overall, across the three years, we have an increase to the forecast of $21.1 million.

That seems large, I'll explain the logic there.

In 2026, the drop of $3.3 million in the forecast is related to the new crop of school zone cameras that began to be installed in late 2025 and are still being installed now into 2026. The early returns from that new crop of cameras, which essentially doubled the size of this camera program, essentially a new 37 cameras went in to complement the previous stock of 37, so an exact doubling.

And the new cameras, the citation volumes are underperforming expectations somewhat.

We had anticipated them performing about at the average of the old stock and they are underperforming that, so some of this is forecasting forward that lower citation volumes.

The installation schedule has also been pushed back a little further into 26 relative to what we'd anticipated in the April forecast, and that also leads to a downward revision in the 26 outlook.

For 2027 and 2028, The large bumps we see here are due to new cameras coming on that are anticipated for activation in the middle of 2027. These cameras would be 24-hour speed cameras, and so that is a new camera type for the city, so the forecasting is admittedly challenging, but we believe that those will drive about $9 million in revenue in 2027. and then so that's, 2027 is about half a year of these new speed cameras, 28 is a full year of those speed cameras and that's what's driving these revisions upward in those years.

All right, and then there's that row almost all the way at the bottom, essentially adding up all the revenues from the general fund plus all the non-general fund revenues and showing the change, overall change in the forecast between April and August.

The three-year difference is 116 million.

Again, quite a lot of money, but relative to the overall size, it's less than 1.5%, so not particularly big revision here.

Again, the main change, the biggest jump here is in 2026, where the year-over-year growth is 7.3%.

it drops to 2.2 in the following year and 4.1 the one after.

Before you move on, if you could.

Colleagues, do you have questions on this slide?

I have a few, so I'll just, as we were talking a little bit more about muddling through what I'm going to call a stagnant economy here in the city of Seattle, over the last year or two we've been having this conversation of are we growing, are we receding, are we stagnant?

I know that recessions are a technical term that are larger than any one city.

which is why we saw in the 1980s Aberdeen had a local recession within their community while the rest of the state and the rest of the nation did very well economically.

As one of my telltales, and thank you Dwight Dively for talking to me about this yesterday about our REIT funding.

REIT is always a telltale of how is our economy going.

And so I'm seeing in our past years in these conversations us sitting stagnant Last revenue forecast, REIT started dipping for the first time since 2020, and now we're seeing the jobs leaving the city and our REIT slowing.

The only sales tax that we're gaining is from law changes, not activity.

Is this what you're seeing?

Should we be more concerned about a localized, I don't think we're allowed to technically call it a recession, but a localized stagnation in our economy, more so today than we have in the past?

So when it comes to the revisions to the REIT, let me address that.

And there was essentially a row of downward revisions in REIT.

Looking back at last year, essentially, every forecast has been a downward revision.

Not just in Seattle, similar sort of things have occurred at King County level.

The read forecasts have been essentially revised down starting from April 2025. And there were all these changes that increased the uncertainty coupled with the changes in the tech sector and The local economy is not in a particularly strong place.

The recession is, again, technical terms, as you said, we would require a broad set of indicators not just employment but also looking at incomes looking at wage growth and then observing those closely how much of a decline there is in individual ones how broad based those declines are when it comes to employment how long they are lasting and so The year-over-year change at the regional level for employment is relatively small, it's less than a half percent, but the concerning thing is definitely that recent release by Puget Sound Regional Council, which is dated for March 2025, but there are reasons to believe that the tech sector with those additional layouts that have been announced, that sector is going to have tough times in the coming years, and so that's dragging the local economy.

So we'll stay tuned, we'll stay attentive, and we want to make sure that we're ahead of any, and this is the importance of last year, we added more funds to our reserve accounts, we added more funds to holding back for continuum of care problems that we might see.

We held funds back for federal response.

Last year's budget was, in fact, more prudent than in past years in the sense that we were holding money back in a way that we hadn't before.

And part of that was the work that you present to us, Director Dura, so I appreciate that.

One of the questions I have, additional questions, you're noting that employment figures are down, but Jumpstart is up.

How'd that happen?

Yeah, so that's what this slide is about.

Let me just ask the last question for Joe.

We've retired parking meters, but now begun our automatic traffic safety cameras.

So with one being complete, let's start a new journey.

I appreciate your analysis here because it tracks with what I've experienced with with the Seattle Department of Transportation, where it was, I believe, two years ago that we started funding not only school zone cameras but also the ability to do speed cameras.

It has been...

The most polite way I can put it is difficult to get them to deploy these cameras.

There are a number of places, at least in my district, where residents have had cars hitting buildings because of their excessive speed.

We have I mean, it's just, it is a dangerous situation out there.

Oftentimes SDOT's response is speed humps.

But what we find is that a automatic traffic safety camera, nine out of 10 people never get a second ticket.

And so it is a more effective tool to reduce speeding than speed humps, because if you have a big truck, you can just drive fast, but that camera's never gonna, you can't drive You can't elude that camera.

So I'm noting this, I don't need a response from you today, but it aligns with the policy problems that I've been seeing within the department of getting these cameras deployed on the schedule in which we asked them to.

And so I just appreciate the fact that you are providing us an accurate analysis of what those policy choices have had an impact on our budget.

Thank you.

So now we'll just start talking about this every time we meet.

Yeah, to be clear to the public, parking meters still exist.

Yes.

Yes, a new challenge in forecasting, for sure.

Thank you.

Colleagues, any other questions on this slide?

Director Durst, do you want to come back to telling us how jobs are down but jumpstarts up?

How'd that happen?

Yeah, so some of those layoffs were already announced before the April forecast was prepared and they were built into the April forecast.

There have been some additional layoff announcements since then, but Brand was already baked in in April.

The main driver for the revision here is the change in the outlook for stock prices.

Again, we have reasons to believe based on our analysis of past collection data.

That's an important factor here.

The chart here shows, for illustrative purposes, a set of companies not necessarily operating in Seattle, but some of them are in the broader region.

Some of them are just major companies in the tech sector.

And again, it's a tech sector, an AI build-out that's driving a lot of that growth that we are seeing in the stock market.

So the chart shows the anticipated year-over-year change in the stock price of those of the stock price of those individual companies.

The grey dots are the estimate back in April.

The blue dots are the current estimates.

They are coming from Wall Street analysts.

We're compiling them and using them as an input in the payroll expense tax forecast.

and if you compare where those grey dots are and where the blue dots are in general the outlook is more positive those blue dots are to the right in general from from the grey dots so as a first chart show the financial market has essentially recovered since April after that initial downward and after that initial drop in stock prices and the initial more negative outlook due to the Iran war.

there is still a considerable amount of uncertainty so that the second thing this chart shows the line from the left to the right they spread from the low to the high estimate for the stock price change in that survey of those analysts Now, again, we are using that as one of the main inputs into the forecast in addition to the changes in the employment.

So there are two main components now, but again, the changes in the layoff announcements are relatively small.

they were already expected in the April forecast.

The final thing that we could use, but it's less informative, are the year-to-date collection in payroll expense tax revenues.

Given the way how this tax is imposed, it's based on annual compensations.

Manual payrolls, those quarterly payments are only estimates and, in general, tend to be 25% of the previous year's total obligation, so they don't really provide much of an insight.

Companies, in general, follow that rule unless they have strong reasons to believe that that would lead them to overpay and then they would pay less for a particular quarter.

So yeah, there are these two effects, layoffs in tech sector overall, more negative outlook for employment, but a better outlook for compensation per employee, average compensation per employee based on the restricted stock units and their impact on the wages.

that's also driving the changes in 2027 even more growth is expected in in these stock prices the red dots now are showing the average for the stock price change for those companies and the line again spreads from the low estimate to the high estimate and you can see that the amount of uncertainties is really just fast.

So that means that inherently that revenue stream is quite hard to predict.

we have seen years where it has overperformed our expectations we have seen a year where it has significantly underperformed our expectation that also ties back to that chart showing the year over changes year over year changes in total employment back in 2024 or the payroll expense tax revenues for year 2024 grew year over year but came in significantly below our expectations and our initial assessment was that that was because the job growth has occurred in in King County, but not really in Seattle.

And that's consistent with what we are seeing in this recent release of employment data by Puget Sound Regional Council.

So that's the employment data is now a new source that we have started incorporating into the forecast to account for the impact of layoffs and overall changes in employment among those taxpayers that are paying this tax.

Again, there is inherently a lot of uncertainty given lots of limitations regarding the data and the underlying factors driving that revenue stream.

So unless there is any other questions, we can move to the pessimistic forecast.

Sorry, Jan, so I guess the question there is, we have fewer employees, but they have a higher net worth.

Is that the answer to the question about Jumpstart?

Yeah, so the change is, so there is a year-over-year decline for payroll expense tax from 406 to 394 year-over-year.

That, again, because there are layoffs expected, and they are expected to have an impact on payroll expense tax revenues.

The revisions, those upwards revisions, have to do with the change in the outlook for stock prices, which has improved since April.

And so, going into the future, again, stock prices are expected to grow, and that's offsetting those losses.

Helpful clarification, not net worth, but compensation.

Thank you.

So turning to the pessimistic scenario, again, that's the second of the three scenarios.

We are developing a baseline revenue forecast, the pessimistic scenario, and then an optimistic scenario forecast.

In the interest of time, I will not show the optimistic scenario here, but it's available.

We have distributed it and will be available on our website.

We do have reasons to believe that the pessimistic scenario is more relevant.

Again, given that there is 25 to 30 percent probability of a recession, that downside risk is quite relevant.

It's certainly possible that individual revenue streams will outperform our expectations.

But again, in the interest of being financially prudent and considering that the downside This is where we want to spend our attention during this in this presentation.

So the downturn in the economy would draw down, will drag down those revenues which are driven by the economy.

So sales tax, business and occupation tax are the two primary ones where the revision or the change from the April forecast would be significant and to the downside.

Back in April, the Forecast Council has, based on our recommendations, adopted the baseline scenario.

So the comparison here is between the baseline scenario in April and the pessimistic scenario in July.

So again, should the recession occur, it would have a meaningful impact on large revenue streams.

There is also some assumptions around the other revenue streams, and I'll let CBO staff talk to you.

Yeah, I would say just by and large, the revenue streams that the city budget office forecasts are a little less dependent on economic conditions, so we generally don't see quite the outsized impact of a pessimistic scenario on these revenue streams.

One exception to note would be property taxes, particularly that that stream is relatively stable given how state law dictates we increase our revenue collections for property taxes.

It is pretty much guaranteed at 1% plus the value of new construction.

So we do see growth slow in a pessimistic scenario, particularly because of that new construction piece being depressed, but overall those revenues would still increase though at a lower rate in the pessimistic scenario.

All right, so yeah, as you can see, especially the 27 and 28, those two years would be the ones where the recession would have a meaningful impact on revenues.

For the first year, the 2026, we still have that positive effect of higher sales tax.

Since we already have a year in with sales tax collection, the impact there is coming again from that higher collection due to 5814. So that dominates.

comes to the non-general fund revenues.

A recession would also mean significantly lower stock prices and potentially additional layoffs.

Both of those would drive down the payroll expense tax revenues.

The overall impact is quite significant, 63 million less compared to the, April baseline forecast.

For REIT, again, that's quite a significant drop there because of the overall downturn that we tend to see whenever there is a recession, REIT falls significantly, and that's exactly the kind of impact this forecast has built into it.

So overall, when it comes to the three year difference, it's 233 million less compared to the April baseline.

the difference between the pessimistic scenario in July and the baseline scenario in July is even larger because the July baseline is higher than the April baseline so the overall change would be the 232 shown here plus the 116 so that's the overall spread between the baseline and the pessimistic.

Again, there is an optimistic scenario which adds some revenues.

There is potential to the upside, but we do believe that the downside risks are probably skewed more to the downside than to the upside.

That said, this table here compares even that optimistic scenario to the baseline, and you can see that it would result in potentially meaningful additional revenues there.

Thank you, Director Duras.

I see we have the ability, we might be able to stay on time, so I would say If we could jump ahead to the social housing and the forecast risks and scenarios, that would be great.

Yeah, we are close to the end, yes.

The social housing tax forecast has been updated.

Our office has been asked to provide forecasts for the developer.

So we have looked at the collection for 2025 obligations and the year-to-date collection for 2026. there is a first quarter that's completely in potentially some late returns might show up but most of it should be in anyway but the second quarter is still still being being filed and being processed so that that was used together with the data that we have on on the employment coming from Implement Security Department.

So similar sort of an approach, payroll expense tax with the Cavia that we have only one year of collection, so we cannot really do a full analysis of, let's say, what the impact of a higher stock prices would be, but that's where this is going to be heading in the future.

The reason is that those two are imposed on similar base, not exactly the same, but they share some similarities.

The tax base is narrow for social housing tax, just like it is for payroll expense tax, even narrower.

There is only about 220 taxpayers for 2025. About half of that have filed Q1 and Q2 obligations.

More are expected later on because of the way how this tax is imposed only on access compensation above a million.

So companies are, not all of them are not all the employees that they pay are hitting it at the same time.

It's also similarly concentrated to payroll expense tax, top 10 taxpayers pay about two thirds of the overall tax, top 50 about 90%.

So that means that there is again inherently a lot of uncertainty regarding the forecast.

The three scenarios that are here are not necessarily showing the whole uncertainty when it comes to comes to the possible outcomes even this year just like for payroll expense tax those first couple of years they have seen significant variance from between the forecast and the actuals and that's possibly going to occur here as well.

All right, and so finally wrapping it up with the forecast risk and scenario recommendation.

Again, the iron conflict is driving a lot of changes in the economic outlook.

The overall outlook is not that different compared to what was in April.

The probability of a recession has come down.

the economy is kind of going through a tough time but it's not breaking yet there are certainly elevated risks the growth is very concentrated and so the risks are there the baseline scenario is however considerate by the US forecasters as the most likely outcome for the regional economy again the data that we have received paints a picture of a weaker economy compared to the national one on the more positive side we have seen collection which is not significantly lower than what we were expecting and in some cases for sales tags in particular is actually notably above than the April forecast and so Taking all of that into account, we continue with our recommendation of a baseline scenario.

The outlook is not significantly worse.

There isn't any sort of compelling argument why we should be adopting a scenario that assumes that the economy is heading into recession, and so the baseline is the recommendation.

With the same caveat as last time, that there is high uncertainty because of the policy changes at the federal level that are just really hard to predict and because of those legislative changes that make it trickier to forecast sales tax and business and occupation tax so the variance might be larger when we see the 2026 actuals.

So with that, I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you, Director Duras.

Thank you, Sean, Joe, Alexandra.

Always fantastic and amazing work just noting Director Duras, since your time here at the city, you've been with us through the pandemic when we had more accurate forecasts in the state, and through all of these different ups and downs, you've always led us through an impressively accurate forecast, and so just greatly appreciate it, especially noting that we did have to adopt a pessimistic forecast, I think, just two years ago, and so just greatly appreciate all your work.

Colleagues, at this time, are there any questions about the forecast that we've received?

No questions.

I appreciate all the information.

Thanks for all the information.

Certainly very detailed.

I think I've had an opportunity to talk to a couple of folks about their own briefings on it, so I don't have any additional questions.

Thank you.

And I would just note, other than three revenue sources for which there always is great uncertainty, everything else was like exactly right on the April forecast, which is remarkably good work.

Now, if only SDOT will get those red light and traffic cameras out there.

Am I right?

Council President, any other comments this time?

No, I don't have any.

Thank you for the presentation.

Very detailed.

So thank you.

Fantastic.

Per the ordinance that created the Forecast Office, and this Forecast Council does the role of the Forecast Council to review and approve the forecast.

In terms of approving the forecast, if we concur, With the recommendation, there's no formal vote required.

The goal of the legislation is to remove the risk of political influence and create a little bit more collaboration here at City Hall.

So we are in city council chambers, but we are not a city council committee.

We are a joint forecast council.

That said, we do represent the elected leadership of both the legislative and executive branches.

It is thus appropriate that we have the authority together to override the recommendation should we choose to.

But with all the compliments that we just provided the team, I doubt we're going to override you today.

Just with your great accuracy, we all greatly appreciate your work.

As you've heard, Director Duras has recommended the baseline scenario of the August 2026 forecast.

In the case that there are no objections, we can move forward.

So I'm going to just ask formally, are there any objections to-let me see how this is not-are there any objections to adopting the recommended forecast by the Forecast Office?

No objections.

Seeing no objections.

And so that means hearing no objections, direct the Forecast Office to record our concurrence with the recommended forecast in the meeting minutes.

And with that, is there any further business?

Any good of the order?

Seeing none, we have reached the end of our formal agenda before adjourning.

I want to remind everyone that the next meeting will take place on Friday, October 16th at 9.30 a.m.

So we'll get chambers instead of everyone else when we will receive that final forecast update of this year.

Director Duras, the entire team, I greatly appreciate you.

We started a half an hour late and we're ending four minutes early.

Appreciate you so much.

And so no further questions.

We are adjourned.

Thank you.

Thank you.