## Meeting Overview On a gray Monday morning in April 2026, the City of Bellingham's Budget and Finance Committee convened to confront what Finance Director Andy Asbenson would later describe as sobering financial realities. The committee, chaired by Council Member Lisa Anderson and including Council Members Dan Hammill and Councilmember Williams (filling in for the late-arriving Michael Lilliquist), gathered to consider three interconnected budget ordinances that would reveal the city's mounting fiscal challenges. What began as routine year-end budget reconciliation quickly transformed into a stark examination of Bellingham's structural budget deficit. The meeting would expose how the city's general fund deficit had ballooned from an anticipated $350,000 to nearly $6 million, forcing difficult conversations about the sustainability of city services and the urgent need for solutions like a proposed Regional Fire Authority (RFA) to fundamentally restructure municipal finances. ## The Triple-Barreled Budget Ordinances Finance Director Asbenson approached the podium with a color-coded packet designed to help committee members navigate what he acknowledged was "a lot of paper, a lot of numbers." The three ordinances before them were, as he explained, "all directly connected to each other" — a financial domino effect that required simultaneous approval to maintain budget accuracy. "When we create the budget, we have an estimated beginning reserve, and not until year end can we actually calculate the true ending reserve which then becomes the beginning reserve for 2026," Asbenson explained, laying out the technical foundation for what would become a politically charged discussion. The first ordinance simply reconciled these beginning and ending reserve balances — a routine bookkeeping exercise that nonetheless revealed the city's deteriorating financial position. The second ordinance addressed reappropriations: $72.4 million in projects and services that had been budgeted in 2025 but remained unspent, requiring authorization to continue into 2026. "These are funds that were budgeted in 2025 but were unspent," Asbenson clarified. "The projects were — many of them already have begun in 2025... but others were maybe some smaller amounts that were not …