Budget Committee October 16, 2023   10/16/2023

Good morning.

My name is Emily Koski.

I'm the chair of the Budget Committee.

I'm going to call to order our regular committee meeting for Monday, October 16th.

Councilmember Payne?

Present.

Wansley is absent.

Rainville?

Present.

Vita?

Present.

Ellison is absent.

Osman is absent.

Jenkins is absent.

Chavez, present.

Chigtay, present.

Johnson is absent.

Palmisano is absent.

Chair Koski, present.

Let the record reflect that we have a quorum.

Today we will continue hearing presentations from city departments on the mayor's 2024 recommended budget.

On the agenda today is the Office of Community Safety and Emergency Management Department.

We'll begin with a presentation from the Office of Community Safety.

Here to present is Interim Commissioner Lee Sheehy.

Thank you Chair Koski, members of the committee.

This morning I thought I would provide a brief overview of the history actually of the Office of Community Safety because I think it's instructive to the mayor's supplemental budget which is in fact the topic of the day.

The office itself was created in October of 2022.

Its first employee, I just leaned over to Mr. Jeffries, he was the first employee and he was hired in December.

So since the end of 2022, the Office of Community Safety has been a startup entity almost one year later.

I would say it has made significant strides in integrating and aligning the four existing departments of first responders and the creation of a new department which is done also in October in the Department of Neighborhood Safety.

The importance of that is that that was an underlying principle of the creation of the office of community safety and a principle I think that moved to put public safety together with community safety and I think progress has been made in that regard.

Since that time, a couple of other points that struck me.

The court settlement in the MDH litigation was in fact July of this year, within days of the release of the Safe and Thriving Communities Report.

So since July, those two issues, the implementation of police reform and the alternatives to policing have been front and center in the evolving Office of Community Safety and of course of the council's interests.

The Dr. Alexander's announcement of retirement was in July and I began in this interim capacity on September 2nd Some members may have seen this it was presented I think a week or two ago at the Public and Health Safety Committee is a draft and I want to emphasize draft because since the beginning I've said I'm here to serve Hopefully help the new commissioner

be successful in his tenure.

This draft was an attempt to go from, I would say, a very nascent org chart presented some time ago to the Budget Committee to one that I think reflects what we now have is the current focus on two things.

As you can see, a Director of Community Safety Design and Implementation, a Director of Partnerships and Outreach.

The office currently consists of nine positions.

The mayor's budget proposal adds three more.

The office currently has four open positions that are funded.

Communications Director of Partnerships and two Media Relations.

coordinators which I previously testified I think to this committee I'm holding in abandons for the new commissioner to make decisions on whether those are the right roles and whether those resources should be utilized, can be utilized differently.

The new budget contains funding for the director of community safety design and implementation and project coordination support for that, both that director and also the community safety design team.

Sometimes when I put up this chart, I want to, that's why I put up the other one to be clear, the departments clearly report to the Commissioner of Community Safety and I want to ensure you that that's how I think the nominee perceives it and that's certainly how I've conducted myself in this interim period.

Quickly highlighting the priority objectives, we have actively set up hiring for existing positions, finalized creating new positions.

In fact, I believe that the Director of Community Safety Design and Implementation will be before the Council in mid-November as a new appointed position.

We are attempting to facilitate

the kind of recruitment and posting of positions so that the new commissioner can hopefully have his team in place by the end of this year, roughly one year after the office was stood up.

We've activated a community safety design process, working with the Department of Performance Management and Innovation in discussions with them and other external thought leaders including Dr. Oftelli, which I previously reported.

develop and improve policies and procedures for coordinating short and long-term efforts of the five underlying departments.

Those departments meet bi-weekly to discuss those issues as well as the overall integration and forward-looking of the Office of Community Safety and to collaborate with the City Attorney's Office and MPD regarding the settlement agreement and the ongoing Department of Justice discussions.

Some achievements, I think I've touched on these and some risks I think are worth noting.

There were gaps associated with staffing transitions and the ongoing hiring efforts which I think are being as rapidly as possible addressed.

Stakeholder expectations regarding systems change, I think it leads to the point that change takes time.

Change takes time.

This is a quick snapshot and I'll have one other slide on the mayor's proposed $483,000 supplemental budget request for the Office of Community Safety.

I think I've touched on these numbers on the next page.

touches basically on the overall budget in the upper right-hand corner from the current 2023 budget to the 2024 plan and the recommended 2020, the mayor's recommended supplemental budget, which would bring it to $2.1 million, virtually all of it personnel.

I want to note when this office was set up, virtually no non-personnel funding for the Office of Community Safety was provided.

And there's the math behind what I touched on.

Thank you so much for the presentation.

Thank you Madam Chair.

I saw in the footnote that you are doing a reprioritization consideration for some of those media specialists.

So I'll try to answer the question from my perspective, but with the important caveat that that's really the Commissioner's decision.

Looking at the balance of the ability to serve the police department, which as you might guess is the heaviest user of media and the other departments, I think it is possible the Commissioner can look at those and potentially find other project analysts, project management, which I think would be of use in building out the community safety program and also the alignments of the department.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Mr. Sheehy, thank you for coming down today.

I'm wondering if, I don't know if it's Jared or Luanna, but you know, could come into my office and make an appointment so I can understand better the community outreach grant funding and violence prevention.

I'm still a rookie, I'm lost at all that, but I've had a really good result on the riverfront with culturally specific

Community Outreach and I want to continue that in the ward.

Thank you and we'll do so.

Alright, I'm not seeing any further questions.

Thank you so much for this presentation and appreciate going back words a little bit too so that we can get the full picture, especially since it's a new.

Thank you.

Next, we have a presentation from the Emergency Management Department.

I will invite Interim Director Brian Gorman to give that presentation.

Good morning, Chair Koski, committee members.

I'm Brian Gorman, Assistant Director of Operations, currently serving as the interim director.

Today, we have a brief overview of our budget for 2024.

Assistant Director Kate McCabe will

provide that overview for you.

Good morning, Chair Koski, Council members.

Again, I'm Kate McKay.

And so just wanted to begin with a brief overview of our mission statement for our department here.

And really within emergency management programs, there are five main mission areas that they focus on.

So they are

prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.

And so by doing those things, we really serve the people who live, work, and play in the city of Minneapolis.

Our program overall is structured around NFPA 1600, which is a national standard best practice for how you would organize an emergency management program.

We also pay attention to any federal guidelines, state, and then local ordinances that we need to

address.

We've got our org structure on here right now.

Currently, our director position is vacant.

So we'll be hoping to fill that over the next few months.

In terms of metrics, back in 2019, we developed a performance measurement manual.

There's actually 11 metrics that we track related to our emergency management program.

Nine of those we're responsible for as a department.

For the purposes of the budget, there's three that we focused on with the performance management folks at the city here So our first is our watch officer program.

We operate a 24 by 7 by 365 watch officer program what that means is a staff member from emergency management is on call 24 7 and

and they're there to support coordination, communication in the event that there's a more complex incident.

Most things that happen in the city, you know, the fire department can handle a single house fire on their own.

They don't need support from emergency management.

What we're watching for is those more complex incidents that are going to impact the overall city.

Then in terms of warning sirens, we have 65 sirens within the city of Minneapolis that we're responsible for the maintenance of.

You hear those tested on a monthly basis, but we need to do regular maintenance to make sure that they're available if we need to sound them for the residents or visitors of the city.

For our continuity of operations plans, our Assistant Director of Risk and Resources, Eric Gustafson, works with 21 departments in the city to develop their own continuity of operations plans.

So we want to make sure that if something doesn't go as planned, that we're able to continue operations as a city.

If you recall, in August of 2022, there was actually a continuity event where we had an IT outage and several of the departments had to institute those plans so that we were able to still respond to any issues that we had during that time period.

Some of our key achievements from the last couple of years here in 2022, we came back before you guys with our updated emergency operations plan that you approved in May of 2022.

We implemented a software system that allows us, whether we're operating a in-person emergency operations center or virtually, it's a common operating picture software where we can share information across departments.

we maintained our watch officer program and we actually moved our warehouse last year so we'll talk more about what we have in our cash that would support the citizens residents of Minneapolis here in a few slides

For 2023 achievements, one of the key things we've been working on this year is related to the 2020 AAR.

We went through this NIMS reset training and exercise program.

We've offered a variety of classes.

You'll hear more about this in a couple weeks as part of the quarterly update on the 2020 AAR, but we've had

folks from police, fire, public works, communications who've gone through a series of training and exercises here this year to make sure that we're ready in the event of a larger scale incident.

In January we had the roll out of the enterprise wide emergency management training course and we were able to hire a outreach and communications coordinator who's been able to support community outreach and education efforts.

She has her next ready camp starting next week and then we've completed all of the 2020 AAR items our department was responsible for.

In terms of risks for the department, one of the biggest ones is grant vulnerabilities.

What I mean by that, a good portion of the budget within emergency management is grant funded and while the grant has been ongoing for a significant portion of time, there is the possibility that there could be changes at either the state or federal level in terms of

how the program is administered or how the funds are allocated.

Another risk that is not unique to emergency management but because emergency management comes into play when things generally aren't going great is just citywide staff turnover.

You lose that institutional knowledge when folks leave and then if you're in that high stress situation trying to respond to an incident and they don't have the knowledge of how things

work that can be problematic.

In terms of lessons learned, we've definitely seen improved communications related to the Office of Community Safety here.

We've seen that value in building relationships both with our internal departments and external partners.

I'm still newer to the city.

I've been here for just over a year and I had to get to know the other folks in emergency management in the metro area here.

and get to know the other folks in the city.

So we've seen the value in the training from the NIMS reset, working with police, fire, communications folks, and then also just going through the continuous improvement process.

So a couple weeks ago at the PHS meeting we talked about AARs and how, so the after action reviews, how we take the suggestions in there and use that to improve our processes and procedures so that we can be even better.

Looking at our overall program so you can see our budget for the last couple years and then the plan budget for next year.

Essentially we're staying about the same.

The main difference in 2023 is just timing of grants here.

So we're budgeted for 9.5 FTEs.

Our vacancy right now is that director position.

So here you'll see these are the nine metrics overall that our department is responsible for.

We've already talked about the watch officer, the warning sirens, and the continuity operations here.

So in terms of public education, our outreach coordinator, she's been out at numerous community events working with different non-profits and other entities around here to make sure that people understand the importance of preparedness, because that's one of the best things you can do for an emergency is be prepared for it.

Then we also have a couple capabilities here that they're contingent.

We really would only use them in the event of an incident.

So the way we test whether or not we'd be able to respond to those is through our exercise program.

So we have our emergency operations.

We did an emergency operations center exercise earlier here this summer.

For the recovery operations, that's also one we did a damage assessment exercise.

So we practiced what we would do in the event that we needed to conduct a damage assessment.

So we have, this is essentially a way that we can look at the vital signs of the department.

It doesn't mean that everything is as good as it could be.

We could still potentially improve our program, but it's meeting the standards that we've identified through NFPA 1600 and other requirements out there, both in terms of the plan and the performance is what you're seeing on here.

When we talk about our cash, so we have a warehouse that we maintain several items that we could use for an incident here in the city of Minneapolis, so that includes respiratory protection, it includes functional needs, so we have walkers, canes and wheelchairs, we have enough

small animal sheltering for up to 500 animals.

We have cots and blankets.

These are all items that were funded by the federal government.

And while we could use them locally, we could also help out our neighbors if something were to happen in another jurisdiction around here as well.

Prevention and Mitigation.

So in terms of prevention, when you see things on the city's social media page about preparedness, last week was Fire Prevention Week, there's Severe Weather Awareness Week, all of that messaging is

Partially prevention and preparedness there.

Mitigation is what we do to prevent or to, sorry, prevention is what we do to reduce our vulnerabilities.

A common response or way to mitigate a risk is you'll see in low-lying areas around rivers, a lot of times they'll take buildings, whether it's businesses or homes, and they'll replace it with parklands because you're mitigating the flooding risk by doing that.

For employee disaster assistance, things we've done to support that is the enterprise-wide employee management training, as well as that's been incorporated into the COOP exercises Assistant Director Gustafson is doing.

Just to call your attention to the top right here so you see our current budget in there what the original 2024 plan is and then in the mayor's recommended budget there's a slight change there and The change is primarily related to this national incident management system maintenance so related to the

NIMS Project, NIMS Reset Project.

What we noticed throughout this year was that there was going to be an ongoing need to continue this work.

I know at last year's budget presentation council member Palmisano discussed the council's commitment to support that 2020 AAR and really what we've seen is this has been great to do the training and exercise but we're going to need to continue that.

We're going to continue to have staff turnover and so we're going to have new folks who are starting at the city who are going to need this training.

Even for those staff that don't turn over you still need to come back to work and review and make sure that you're solid on that whether we're talking training or exercises.

So this would allow there's no FT's and involved in this proposal here It's really about making sure we've got a better trained workforce that is ready to respond in the incident of an emergency or disaster So it's not just for emergency management department staff It would be for police fire again communications public works other staff at the city as well.

So I

Thank you, Ms. McKay.

I just want to note that we've been joined by President Jenkins and Vice President Palmisano.

I also am looking to see if there are any questions.

Thank you Madam Chair.

I have a question about that watch officer.

Chair Koski, Councilmember Rainville, it can vary a little bit.

So we've had planning meetings for different events that the watch officer or at least a representative from our office has been involved in.

It varies depending on the size of the incident for what support is needed.

So whether, for example, for the marathon that was something I was the watch officer during that and I was over in Saint Paul that morning.

So in communication, MPD was there as well.

I know fire was part of that, so.

But it varies depending on the event and what there are for risks out there.

Thank you.

Chair Koski, Councilmember Rainville, typically for just a regularly scheduled event, that is within the capabilities of police and fire to handle.

We would be there if there were elevated risks or other needs identified.

All right, I am not seeing any further questions or discussion here.

So at this point, I'll ask the clerk to file these presentations.

I appreciate you being here.

Our next meeting to receive departmental positions for the mayor's 2024 budget is scheduled for Monday, October 23rd at 10 a.m. That day, we are set to hear from Emergency Communications Center and Neighborhood Safety Department.

With that, we've

concluded all business to come before the committee day without objection.

We stand adjourned.