Budget Committee May 20, 2024   5/20/2024

Good afternoon, my name is Aisha Chugtai and I'm the chair of the Budget Committee.

Councilmember Payne?

Present.

Rainville?

Present.

Fita?

Present.

Ellison?

He's absent.

Cashman?

He's absent.

Jenkins?

Chavez?

Present.

Let the record reflect that we have a quorum.

Colleagues, we have six discussion items on our agenda today.

Our first item is the appointed position of Neighborhood Safety Deputy Director and our second item is the appointed position of Neighborhood Safety Associate Directors.

As both are in the Neighborhood Safety Department, we'll be discussing them together and taking both of those positions up together.

Chair Chugtai and Vice Chair Koski and members of the committee, I'm here today to talk about four positions.

One is a Deputy Director and three are Associate Directors in the Neighborhood Safety Department.

I'll start with the Deputy Director.

It's part of the Neighborhood Safety Department and directs community safety, design, innovation and implementation.

In collaboration with the director, the deputy develops and manages the budget and overall strategy for the department.

The position is responsible for the day-to-day operations of the department.

And the deputy director has been evaluated at 555 points, grade 12.

The 2024 salary schedule ranges from about 120.8K to 143.2K.

The incremental cost is covered by salary savings from delaying the hiring of this position until May of 2024 and changes are effective May 23rd of 2024.

The next three jobs I'm going to talk about are the Associate Directors of Neighborhood Safety.

The three directors are part of the Neighborhood Safety Department and they will manage and serve as the point of contact for Neighborhood Safety projects.

The Associate Directors have been evaluated at 513 points, grade 11.

The 2024 salary schedule ranges from 111.4

The costs for 2024 are being paid by salary savings and the changes again are effective May 23rd of 2024

These positions meet the criteria of Section 2010-10 of the Minneapolis Code of Ordinances.

They report to the Director of Neighborhood Safety.

They're members of the Neighborhood Safety Executive Management Team.

They lead the development and implementation of city policies, goals, and strategic planning for neighborhood safety.

They require leadership, vision, team building, and strategy implementation.

and they establish policies, goals and strategies that are consistent with the goals and priorities established by the Mayor, City Council and the Director of Neighborhood Safety.

Welcome, Commissioner.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Chair Chuktai, Vice Chair Koski, of course, Council President.

pain, not Chavez.

Confused me there for a second.

I'm here just to briefly talk about the request here today.

I think there's a lot of discussion about these positions in AEO, so I'll try to be brief.

I know there's a full schedule here today.

So this is what neighborhood safety currently looks like.

The request for these positions

really gets us here.

And the reason for the requests, like I've talked before, is about sustainability, accountability, and compliance as well.

So with these positions that we're requesting to be reclassified, you can see in the

Director, the Deputy Director position and the Associate Director positions.

We can cover this with the existing budget for 2024.

The ongoing costs, of course, will get us in 2025.

What you'll see in this slide is just where we are currently by reclassing these positions.

And then the new position that we're asking for later will be the executive aide.

If you look throughout the enterprise, whether that's within the Office of Community Safety and the departments under it, or anywhere else within the enterprise, there's a leadership structure.

Neighborhood safety, as you can tell, does not have that.

If you had a question at all about finance in any other department, there's a person that you can talk to about finance.

If you ask that neighborhood safety, it's scattered amongst all the employees.

And that's why we're really looking at bringing that structure there for accountability, sustainability, and compliance as well.

I think just by the title of the positions you'll know what their some of their responsibilities of course the deputy directors to support the director of neighborhood safety director finances for financial situation compliance and administration think of all the contracts that are in neighborhood safety whether they're federal state county or

or some philanthropic money or funding that's going there.

All of those have different requirements.

And then when you look at the associate director of programming position, that position is really about how do we coordinate all the programming, look at the outcomes and where we are.

This of course is just another way of looking at the org chart if council approves these positions.

Thank you for that presentation, Ms. Miller and Commissioner Barnett.

Before we jump into discussion, I'll first note that we have been joined in this meeting by both Councilmember Cashman and Councilmember Jenkins.

Welcome.

And we'll be using speaker management to manage the discussion here today.

Thank you Council Vice President Chucksi.

First, I'm glad to see infrastructure is being built out in the Neighborhood Safety Department and I'm particularly pleased to see that there are positions that are included in the recommendations here that were also recommended in the Safe and Thriving Communities Report.

I do have a question about the position related to the associate directors, though, which does have a notation saying it's

I had a chance to look

I just wanted to get a sense, Commissioner Barnett

For programming?

Mm-hmm.

Thank you for that question, Council Member Wisely.

What I can tell you is that the direction from Director Nelson Brown, one of the

Qualities that she looks for in all of her employees to have some of the background in crime prevention in

I don't want to say every program is about being unarmed, but all of the qualities that we're looking for in all these positions or expertise in these positions does go directly to some of those principles.

I think one of her, in conversation with her, what I would say, one of the things that

I think she feels as though she can do either directly or with an outside source is to also, there's trainings throughout the year by different organizations I think in which she can get people trained up in certain positions as well.

Okay, I will say that's not necessarily assuring for me in terms of Director Nelson Brown.

That's great.

She's, you know, in her searches thinking about these things.

I would rather see those be codified in the actual job posting and expertise, especially since we're having an ongoing conversation right now where there might even be, amongst Director Nelson Brown, not a full understanding of all the best practices related to violence prevention.

and that's being passed on to the relatively new staff that has come into the Neighborhood Safety Department.

So in light of that, you mentioned external provider.

I know in the past John Jason's were re-initiating a contract with them have offered to do HR support so that we are bringing in the best candidates who are or have expertise in violence prevention work.

Chair Tuktai, Council Member Wonsley, I have not had that conversation with representatives from John Jay, but what I can say after the signing of our most recent contract with them, I did reach out to staff there and we did discuss some of the things that

We need to do in the city to get us back into that conversation where we're a model for the rest of the nation.

If there's a way for a staff memo, I know Director Nelson Brown for some reason has been out for several weeks.

We haven't been able to directly connect with her.

It sounds like she played a pivotal role in crafting the job description for these two positions.

It would be good to know why that particular expertise as it pertains to violence prevention or intervention, why that's not being codified in the actual job description.

There will be actual, because I understand the director has the discretion to work closely with John Jay, that happened in the past, to have them be part of the hiring process, bringing hiring panels, recruitment.

So again, we're getting the best aligned person in this work.

If Director Nelson Brown could answer those two questions in the staff memo for me, because it seems like that's the missing piece here.

We'll note that for administrative follow up.

Any further questions Council Member?

That is all, thank you.

Thank you Madam Vice President, welcome.

My question around these roles really comes down to looking at the Safe and Thriving Communities Report and how that report breaks everything down into preventative services, responsive services, and restorative services.

and specifically I'm trying to think through because I see you with these three new associate directors one of them actually holds the totality of all three of those and I was wondering the both the thought process around the division of labor and more specifically I understand that there's some pretty regular meetings with the leadership of all of the public safety departments, fire, police, 911 EMS and neighborhood safety and I'm wondering

If we have the right representatives at the table for those in terms of the first response, because you can see a lot of collaboration and overlap with fire and MPD obviously, but then something like emergency management isn't typically a first response.

and the

leadership conversations around collaboration and making sure that our first response is coordinated.

So there's a lot in there.

Thank you for the question, Chair Tuktai, also Council President Payne.

I think what you'll see, for instance, which I think is pretty clear in Social Director of Finance, I think we all know that's

Funding all those things compliance and administration direct associate director of compliance administration like I was saying earlier that position When you look at all the different contracts we have all the different Requirements in keeping up with reports and things like that making sure we're doing what we're supposed to do.

That's fine I think your question really goes to the associate director program and whether or not That's that

the capacity is there and their responsibility is there.

Council President Payne, I think that's where the direction we're going when we talk about capacity and the approach that we're taking is to move very intentionally to how we're adding positions, to be fiscally responsible, to be responsible to all of the programs that we have.

And so the hope is that

this position can handle all of those things.

That is the hope.

We're looking at requests that we would make for the 25-26 budget ask and we're going through that process right now in determining whether there should be additional requests for positions or not and so we're working through that as we speak.

Hopefully that answers

That part of your question.

The other part about Do we have the right people at the table for first responders?

When you look at neighborhood safety

I think where you really see that first response is with the behavioral crisis team of course.

I was lucky enough to do a ride along with them on Friday and so they definitely are in that spot of first response.

Right now we're in the process and it's taken a long time but I think we're near having someone permanent to manage their contract.

Their contract of course is different than most other contracts we have because they're so integrated into our 911 system.

I would say since Director Nelson Brown been out for a little bit, she's back now, that is on our list to continue the conversation, but you should be assured that

Canopy routes that the management for behavioral crisis team has had a direct line to me We've talked about that.

They have direct communication with Director Nelson Brown as well as we move along I think

Really one of the things that we have to look at long term is to have a contract that's just not a year or two when we're looking at a service that's integrated into 9-1-1 to really look at if

Yep Any further questions or discussion?

Seeing any, I will move approval of item number one and item number two.

Do I have a second?

Second.

It's been properly moved and seconded.

We'll move forward with a voice vote on this item.

Those opposed say nay.

Any abstentions?

The ayes have it and that motion carries.

Our next item is related to the appointed position of the City Clerk.

I will invite Rika Stenerson from our Human Resources Department to begin that presentation.

Good afternoon, Council Vice President Chug Thai, Council President Payne, and members of the committee.

I'm Ricka Stanerson from the Human Resources Department and here to speak to you about the City Clerk reclassification.

As you know, the City Clerk is the municipal officer responsible for administering elections, supporting and directing legislative processes, managing records, data, and information assets for the city.

This position was last reviewed in March of 2013 and established originally at a grade 14.

Since that time, the role has seen significant changes as the city's government structure has changed and what we have learned in the evaluation process is that our city clerk role is very unique and more complex than many other municipal clerk roles as it involves the administration of elections,

and data practices and also provides legislative support to a full-time City Council.

Following our evaluation of the position, the role was placed at a Grade 18 with 811 points with a salary range of 178,428 to 211,515.

We are asking that you adopt findings that the position meets criteria in section 2010-10 of the Code of Ordinances and approve the established salary schedule for the position.

In addition, we are requesting that the change be effective May 9th, and I believe Councilmember Palmisano can speak to some of the history and answer some questions about the role if you have them.

Wonderful.

Thank you for that presentation.

Our speaker management just went down for a second.

So while we wait for that to While we wait for everyone to kind of get back in queue and log back in if you're interested Council Member Palmisano, would you like to speak to this item?

I know this is something you've worked on pretty extensively over the last couple years.

Sure.

I also was trying to figure out where that had just gone.

The position of City Clerk was last reviewed in 2014 and the role has greatly changed since then due to in part government structure changes and the addition of responsibilities such as the formal administration of the city's more than 50 appointed boards and commissions.

The complexities and the importance of the city clerk's core government functions of charter ordinance and records management and an election administration really can't be understated and I have some numbers on that but Since the government restructure the city clerk is the department head of our legislative department.

That's our side and

The legislative department is the only department other than the park board that does not report through the mayor.

The head of the legislative department is comparable to the cabinet of the executive branch.

So city operations officer is grade 19, public safety commissioner is grade 19, and the city attorney is grade 19.

The Legislative Department consists of, yes, the Office of the City Clerk, that's 53 employees, 46 seasonal election employees, 2,500 plus seasonal election judges, the Office of the City Auditor, 17 FTEs, and the City Council Support Staff, which is about 28 FTEs.

The City Auditor's position is a Grade 18.

As the legislative department head and in the same manner as the department heads of the executive branch, the City Clerk is responsible for all administrative and general operational needs of the entire legislative department, including things we're all familiar with, like

directing and making appropriate referrals of issues addressed to the City Council, preparing and administering the legislative department's budget serving as its accounting officer, being responsible for personnel matters, ensuring administrative, technical and logistical support for City Council and all of our committees, providing general coordination among and between the legislative department and the mayor and his administration.

Given that our legislative department's function is to support through the Office of the City Clerk the effective performance of our duties and functions.

Our function, the legislative department's function is to direct and administer core services like elections, retention of city records, data and information assets,

public access to information publications of ordinances and notices and charter changes perform risk-based independent objective assurance and consulting services investigate alleged abuse fraud waste using city's resources monitor and assure compliance with charter ordinances and other laws monitor and assure adherence to sound audit practices

other things through the city auditor.

I don't need to go into all of them.

Wonderful.

Any further questions or discussion from colleagues?

Seeing

No further discussion.

I will move approval of this item.

Do I have a second?

Second.

Those opposed say nay.

Any abstentions?

The ayes have it and that item carries.

The next several items before us today are going to be far more extensive presentations so I'll ask that we let our presenters complete the entirety of their presentation and then we'll take up questions but feel free to start jumping in queue if you have specific

questions.

We'll just hold them all until the end.

This next item in front of us is endorsing the budget recommendations proposed for the legislative department for the 2025-2026 budget, which includes a direction to the council president and vice president to present those recommendations to the mayor.

We'll first receive and file a report on said recommendations.

I will invite Casey Carl, our city clerk, to begin that presentation.

Good afternoon.

Thank you, Madam Vice President, Councilmembers.

My name is Casey Carl.

I have the privilege of serving as Clerk of the City of Minneapolis and in that capacity, as we just discussed, serve as the head of the legislative department for the city government.

As indicated, I'm here to present a proposed budget for our department covering fiscal years 2025 and 2026.

Before I begin, I'd like to recognize my absent colleague and partner, Ryan Patrick, the city's first auditor under our new government structure.

And while he has moved on from the city, his impact has already made a difference in our legislative department.

I think all of you would agree.

Under his guidance, the auditor's office expanded from its core audit function to encompass two new divisions, policy and research and oversight and evaluation, both focused on providing professional support to the City Council and its committees,

with respect to official duties of the body.

And because of his leadership, the Auditor's Office received significant investment by Council over the past two budget years, which will become apparent as we go into today's presentation.

So I wanted to pause and recognize and thank Mr. Patrick and to express for all of us our thanks for his leadership as the City's first City Auditor.

In Mr. Patrick's absence, I'm joined today by our Internal Audit Director and our Acting City Auditor, Siddhartha Poodyal, who will speak to requests from the City Auditor's Office.

And finally, I'd like to recognize the work of Administrative Services Manager, Kate Redden, who's also not with us today, but who put so much into framing up this proposed budget and who has really implemented effective management systems for our department.

So with that, we'll get started looking at the Legislative Department's 2025-2026 budget proposals.

The Legislative Department is built around the City Council.

Council is the elected representative body which holds the legislative and primary policy-making powers of municipal government under the City Charter.

Council is composed of 13 members, each representing a separate ward that contains approximately 33,000 residents.

like other legislative bodies, council operates primarily in three areas.

The first of these, which is I believe the most fundamental and potentially the most visible, is the power council wields in the enactment of municipal law, primarily in the form of ordinances.

Together with the mayor, the council enacts, amends, and repeals public policies aimed at ensuring the health, safety, and welfare of the community.

Council also has final control over the City's financial policies, including the power to levy and apportion taxes, to set fees and fines, to adopt operating and capital budgets, to issue debt and borrow money, to audit and settle accounts, and to designate the City's financial depositories.

These are collectively referred to as the Council's power of the purse.

Second, through its standing committee system, Council maintains a continuous review of organizational performance.

Through its oversight, Council ensures that the funds it's appropriated are used effectively and efficiently on behalf of residents in the delivery of municipal services and programs.

In addition, through standing committees, Council monitors and evaluates the City's performance against established goals and objectives.

And finally, the Council and its individual members advocate for the needs, priorities, and interests of the community and for their wards, as well as residents, and performs these representative functions at local, regional, state, and even national levels.

The Legislative Department exists to provide institutional support to the Council in the performance of these duties, shown on this slide.

so pursuant to section 4.2 f of the charter the clerk is appointed by and serves at the pleasure of the council the city clerk serves in two primary capacities first as the secretary of the municipal corporation which involves responsibilities for administering elections and managing information assets and second as the secretary of its governing body this is reflected in the three major business lines shown here elections and voter services records and information management and legislative support and operations

Pursuant to Section 4.2g of the charter, the City Auditor is appointed by and serves a four-year term under the direction of our Independent Audit Committee.

The City Auditor also serves in two primary capacities.

First, as an independent evaluator of city performance and of its systems of control and accountability, and second, as a professional, non-partisan staff resource for council,

with respect to research, analysis, and support for oversight functions.

This is reflected in the three business lines shown on this slide under the auditor, internal audit, policy and research, and oversight and evaluation.

The legislative department has a total complement of 114 full-time positions.

The council has a total of 41 positions, which accounts for about 36% of the total staffing in the department.

The Clerk has a total of 55 positions, which accounts for 48% of the Department's personnel resources, and the Auditor has a total of 18 positions, which accounts for the remaining 16% of the personnel resources assigned to the Legislative Department.

On this slide you can see a four year look back over our department covering fiscal years 2021 through 2023 as well as the adopted budget for 2024 in the far right column.

As the data shows, the department has experienced significant growth during this period.

That growth reflects investments made by the council, especially during the last two fiscal years following implementation of our new government structure.

Most of those increases occurred in the clerk and the auditor programs in 2023 and then again in 2024.

I also want to highlight that the Elections and Voter Services Division within the Clerk's Office is detailed in its own row here and throughout the presentation for three reasons.

First, in prior years, this division was actually budgeted as a separate program outside of the Clerk's Office to allow for more discreet budgeting controls and tracking of election-related expenses.

So although that division has been reincorporated into a holistic clerk budget line item in 2024 and going forward, it is helpful to separate the cost center out for better year-to-year comparisons.

Second, because of the significant variance from year-to-year based on the four-year election cycle, it is helpful to separate election expenses so that the impact of elections can be better understood in context of policy making and budget decision making, particularly in comparison to the rest of this department.

and finally I'd say the Elections Division represents almost half of the entire Clerk Operating Budget.

So it's helpful to separate those planned expenditures for elections out in order to minimize any unintended operating consequences to other programs like legislative support, data practices and transparency initiatives and our work on boards and commissions.

In short, the budget for elections and voter services accounts for roughly one-third of the entire legislative department budget, despite the fact that it only represents one of six different business lines split out between the offices of clerk and auditor.

This underscores the fact that the impact of elections is a significant variable in this department's financing and a major driver when it comes to planning further needs or investment opportunities for the legislative department.

Also as noticed on this slide, the total expenditures for the city clerk program do not reflect operating costs for our city's document solution center, our in-house print center.

Those are paid through internal service funds and service chargebacks to departments.

Those costs then are therefore accounted in the city's overhead models and are not addressed in the department's expenditure budget.

This chart just visualizes the previous four-year budget history I summarized, as it illustrates the impact of significant investments can be dramatically seen in 2023 and 2024.

That growth was primarily in the Clerk and Auditor programs.

As I mentioned, the Council has remained stable across the last several fiscal years, going back multiple decades.

The growth in the Clerk and Auditor programs over the last two fiscal years included some important Council-led investments, and those included, for example, the addition of 27 new full-time positions, which included positions to establish the new policy and research and the oversight and evaluation divisions in the Auditor's Office, as well as outreach and constituent services team in the Clerk's Office, enhancements to our existing positions in the Clerk and Auditor programs,

and some infusions of both one-time and ongoing operating funds, critical project funding to implement reforms for our appointed boards and commissions that passed in October 2023, funding for several pilot projects including the transfer of body-worn camera functions from the Police Department to the Clerk's Records Information Management Division, as well as a new language access program for Council and funding to initiate a constituent services account

and finally 1.2 million dollars for renovations and security improvements to the council's chamber as part of an extensive and multi-year remodeling and renovation of our historic city hall.

In addition to these investments, council authorized significant investments for the 2023 municipal and the 2024 presidential election cycles.

And per my previous comments, elections are one of the biggest pieces of our legislative department budget.

We know our representative system of government begins at the ballot box and Minneapolis has a long and I would like to think proud tradition of ensuring the best possible services to its voters.

But it also does remain true that ensuring ballot access can be expensive and the city has always invested heavily in service of its voters.

This chart visualizes the entire city budget reflecting the total enterprise and it shows the impact of the legislative department as 1.5% of the total approved budget for the current fiscal year, that is 2024.

This data was taken directly from the city's OpenGov platform, which is our online budget information system.

So as illustrated, despite significant additional investments that I've already highlighted, the legislative department today accounts for just 1.5% of the city's total operating budget.

In context, based on the adopted 2024 budget, that means the cost of the legislative department is about $30 based on the property taxes for a median Minneapolis home.

I've highlighted on this slide the specific department program components for easy reference.

So you can see that the city clerk represents just under 1% of the total budget at approximately $18.2 million.

Of that total, nearly half is allocated for the 2024 presidential election.

That means half of the clerk's budget is tied to that presidential election, and the remainder goes to fund all of the other programs in the clerk's office, including legislative support, board and commission coordination, records retention and disposition, data practices, and increasingly department operations, outreach and constituent services, and special projects.

The Council and Audit programs are combined with eight other programs on this chart, in a category that's labeled More.

Together, Council and Auditor equate to just about 1% of the City's total budget, so about 0.5% for each of those programs, and are approximately $8.8 million when combined.

So I think the numbers reflect the legislative department does offer good value and an efficient operation in exchange for the investment of public monies for its major outcomes.

And again, those outcomes include responsive community governance, representation, meaningful participation in local decision-making processes, and effective oversight of the city's performance in serving the largest and most populated city in the state of Minnesota.

This slide is really the heart of our presentation.

It lays out our total requests against a base current service level for both fiscal years 2025 and 2026.

So as shown, the 2025 base budget is $20.5 million.

That's a decrease from the 2024 adopted budget, which equates to about $6.5 million.

The difference between 2024 and 2025 primarily reflects the significant reduction in election funding between a 2024 presidential and a proposed 2025 municipal, as well as the elimination of one-time funds that were approved in the current fiscal year.

The 2025 base budget does, however, include standard increases for core functions that are common across all departments, such as personnel costs, rent and utilities, and other overhead charges.

As you can see, the department is requesting a total of about $8 million in supplemental funds that includes both ongoing and one-time purposes.

If all of the supplementals were to be approved, the 2025 budget would be $28,288,255, and it would include 15 new positions spread across all three of our department programs, that is, across council, clerk, and auditor.

the 2026 base budget which is shown on the right of this chart under the green header is projected to be just over 21 million dollars and the department is proposing an additional 7.2 million dollars in supplemental requests in that out year and as explained the election in each of these years has a significant impact in fact the largest single supplemental in each of these two fiscal years are the regularly planned elections

which together total more than $11 million.

So that accounts for roughly 74% of the total of all of our supplemental requests in both of these fiscal years.

Before we transition into a review of specific funding requests, Madam Vice President, at your request, I wanted to put in a placeholder to highlight a critical supplemental that has not yet been quantified in terms of our needed investments beyond current funding levels.

So this is an investment that would include multiple departments

including the legislative department and pertains to the city's capacity to provide live broadcast and captioning for our public meetings of certain decision making bodies.

As council is aware, the city currently provides live broadcasts for public meetings of council and its committees as well as the public meetings of certain independent policy making bodies.

that includes the Board of Estimate and Taxation, the Charter Commission, the Independent Audit Committee, and it also includes the appointed policymaking bodies operating within the city enterprise that include the Planning Commission, Heritage Preservation Commission, and the Zoning Board of Adjustment, as well as the Community Commission on Police Oversight.

All of these bodies are supported by teams that are represented by the Clerk's Office, the City Attorney's Office, and the Communications and Information Technology Departments.

These four departments are addressing legal requirements associated with accessibility under the Americans with Disabilities Act and other related laws to ensure that the city is meeting its obligations to the entire community.

We know that we will require additional investments in system upgrades, replacements, repairs, as well as potential additional staff to manage these systems and to monitor our compliance.

While we don't yet have an exact budget request at this time, the legislative department is first to present today so I wanted to put this placeholder out there as we get into the budget process knowing that a multi-department request will be forthcoming as part of the mayor's recommended budget

that would be submitted to Council for its review and final determination.

So, simply due to timing factors and ongoing legal negotiations, a complete analysis and recommendation is not available at this time, but I wanted to highlight this critical need so that it's on our collective radars as we move forward through the full biennial budget season.

At this time, I'll turn the presentation over to Mr. Pudyal for the introduction of specific supplemental requests from the City Auditor's Office.

For both the Auditor and the Clerk, we'd like to highlight the requests in 2025 and then in 2026.

Good afternoon Chair Chuktai and the members of the budget committee.

Today I have a few budget recommendation proposals that I'm hoping for endorsement from this committee for the office of the city auditor.

Starting with 2025 there are like total three budget recommendations that are being proposed.

So the first one is a proposal of a position of the IT auditor.

Cyber threats remain a large risk for the city and all municipalities.

The addition of the IT auditor will help ensure the efficient and secure management of our city's IT infrastructures.

With the increasing use of technology to deliver essential services, the role of an IT auditor becomes indispensable in safeguarding

against cyber threats, ensuring compliance with regulations and optimizing operational efficiency.

By conducting comprehensive audits and assessments, this position will identify vulnerabilities, streamline processes, ultimately saving costs in the long run by preventing potential breaches or system failures.

Investing in a dedicated IT auditor will not only protect sensitive information but also uphold public trust and confidence in our city's commitment to effective governance and modernization.

Internal audit has relied traditionally on outside firms to support our

specialized IT audit needs.

These contracts are costly and we miss opportunities to do more by outsourcing the work to more expensive vendors.

By bringing the services in-house will help us build capacity for regular IT work audit work.

as well as overall cost saving in the long run from professional services.

The market for IT auditors has improved as the field is becoming more common.

As such, it should be possible to find a qualified candidate in the budget requested.

The estimated fiscal impact will be 140,173 ongoing for this position.

The next one is the proposal of one person of administrative program coordinator.

The City Auditor's Office has grown substantially over the last four years and would benefit greatly from a professional administrative program coordinator.

The number of administrative functions has increased respectively with the office size and currently the office relies on staff in the office of the city clerk for support.

For independence purposes and efficiency, it would be beneficial to have a dedicated position in the city auditor's office.

The estimated fiscal impact will be $120,338 ongoing.

and the next is proposal of additional professional services support.

The Policy and Research Division has received approximately 50 requests for consultations and reports in its first six months of operations.

The subjects cover a wide swath of city operations and range from very focused topics to broader explorations of a new concept.

Some of the reports necessitate work with the subject matter experts in fields like housing policy, transportation, etc.

It will be beneficial for this team to be able to draw upon a pool of subject matter experts to bolster their work both in rigor and in quantity.

Similarly, the oversight and evaluation division contracts with financial services firm to supplement the work involving analysis of the mayor's proposed budget and other fiscal matters.

While the group and its work is still developing, the needs and requests are likely to rise in similar fashion to that of policy and research divisions.

As such, having a pool of professional services dollars will meet this need.

The estimated fiscal impact would be 300,000 ongoing.

and although I don't have any additional budget recommendation proposal for 2026, I just wanted to leave this slide here as a placeholder that we are at the beginning of the part of the budget adoption and with the new city auditor incoming in near future, there could be a possibility that there will be additional request based on their vision of the office.

However, at this time, I don't have any additional request for 2026.

Madam Vice President, I'll proceed to the supplemental requests from the Clerk's Office.

This is for fiscal year 2025.

For context, the Clerk's Office has a total of nine supplemental requests for 2025 that include $1.7 million in ongoing funding that includes 13 new FTE positions, $4.8 million for the municipal election next year, and an additional $685,115 in one-time funding requests.

Our first request is for a total of 11 new FTE positions.

This would add a third aid to all the ward offices.

As this body knows, a third aid was included in the adopted 2024 budget for Council President and Vice President.

If approved, this request would equalize permanent staffing across all ward offices and include an allocation of two aids and one office associate for each ward office.

All three positions appointed by the Council Member in the Unclassified Services of City

fiscal impact of this proposal is about $112,026 per ward based on the existing aid classification.

And I'll note, as I said at the beginning, the staffing for the ward offices has been consistent over multiple decades.

I came in 2010, there were two aids at that time, and that was the first time there had been a change in many, many decades prior to that time.

just prior to me joining the city and I believe 2028, 2008 or 2009 the second position that what we sometimes call the junior aid position had been transitioned from the clerk's office where it was a represented position to the offices of the city council ward offices as a politically appointed position.

So there has been great stability over multiple decades in the council ward offices.

This within my 14 years

would be only the second time there's been such a change to provide direct staffing for council members.

The next request is for an additional 1 FTE legislative clerk.

This is to add to our team of five existing legislative clerks.

These clerks, as you know, work under a team as a team under the supervision of our manager of legislative support services, Mr. Daylor.

Based on a number of assigned bodies, which I've shown on this slide for your reference, it means that each of these clerks is basically responsible for supporting about three decision-making bodies, or an average of 26 public meetings each month.

Today, these clerks support the council, all of the council's committees, and also the city's independent top-tier policy-making bodies that are again listed on this slide for reference.

The only policy-making bodies not supported by the clerk's office are the Civil Rights and Civil Service Commissions.

This year, the team resumed responsibility for supporting the Community Commission on Police Oversight.

Had done that previously, went away from us, and is now back.

It's a long-term goal of the Clerk's Office to assume responsibility for all of the top-tier policymaking bodies across the enterprise to provide consistency and standardization across those important meeting bodies.

So this additional FTE will help to address both the current and projected future workload of this team.

fiscal impact of this request is $126,148 based on the existing legislative clerk classification.

The next request is for one FTE Administrative Program Coordinator.

Currently there are two such positions in the Clerk's Office.

We've always recommended a three-person administrative team to serve the entire department.

As envisioned, each of these three positions would function as a team under the immediate supervision of our Administrative Services Manager, and they would be roughly 50-50 responsible for department operations and as the assigned primary administrative point person for assigned ward offices.

Some of the core department functions that this team of two currently handle include accounting, procurement, and inventory, and acting as the interface with our city's Finance and Property Services Department, personnel matters, including payroll, benefits administration, health and wellness programming, and acting as an interface with the city's Human Resources Department, staffing the department's reception desk, providing frontline customer service for all of our department divisions,

and a variety of services that have been delegated to the Clerk's Office, including but not limited to the receipt and processing of legal service against the City, management of the City's Domestic Partnership Registry, and the coordination of filings and disclosures, which include, as examples, statements of economic interests, conflict of interest, oaths of office, and other official filings required by law.

The fiscal impact of this 1FTE is $120,338 based on the existing classification.

Our next request in 2025 for ongoing funding is a request for $25,000.

This would fill up our current budget, which is a bit short, to pay for the Harding Street Warehouse.

This is our off-site records storage facility that serves the entire city enterprise.

So all 25 departments must keep and retain records according to set retention schedules.

Most of those are kept at this facility, the Harding Street Warehouse.

currently we have $80,000 in the clerk's operating budget to cover the warehouse but that's been short in the last few years of actual expenditures and so this $25,000 investment gets us to cover the full costs of operating this warehouse on behalf of the city enterprise.

And then in terms of one-time funding for next year's 2025 municipal election, we're asking for approximately $4.8 million for the municipal election.

That election is set for Tuesday, November 4th.

As shown on this slide, this is a significant increase from the actual costs of the 2021 municipal election.

which was the last full municipal election in our cycle.

The difference of approximately $2.7 million shown reflects some notable differences from 2021.

First, almost half of this request, about $1.5 million, is specifically for the purchase of a mobile voting vehicle

and the City Council and the City Council, and funding to outfit and equip that vehicle with elections equipment, accessibility supports, and safety requirements to enable the City to have a mobile voting approach for multiple pop-up sites across the community going forward in future election years.

The mobile vehicle is comparable to a bloodmobile,

So it's like a bus, if you will.

Voters enter on one side, they receive their ballot, they cast their ballot, and they exit on the other.

So it's essentially a trailer that's been outfitted with election equipment and can be taken to different locations throughout the city to literally take the ballot box to the voters.

So again, approximately half of our total request here, about 1.5 million dollars,

is for the purchase and equipment of that mobile vote vehicle.

The remainder of one-time request reflects increases in operating costs to bring ballot production in-house, including printing equipment maintenance, compensation expenses anticipated for the approximate 2,000 judges and temporary workers needed to administer the election, as well as significant increases for postage to support increases that are both already experienced and anticipated for our vote-by-mail operation.

As already indicated, this request is the largest in the Clerk's Office and one of the most significant factors for our overall department budget.

Another one-time request in 2025 shown on this slide is for two pilot projects in our Records and Information Management Division.

As shown, we're requesting $226,000 to fund two temporary workers to address improvements in processing and responding to public data requests by media.

Our intent with this first pilot project is to focus on streamlining and improving our response times as an enterprise to request for public data by the news media.

Frequently, media requests take time that create challenges for production deadlines.

While the City has no legal obligation to expedite media requests, it can create unnecessary friction in the City's relationships with media outlets when responsive data is not provided in time for their production deadlines.

So this pilot project would explore how our data practices team could better cooperate with our media representatives and our operating departments while not impacting the status and work on other pending data requests.

The requested funding is based on the costs for two temporary workers using our existing classification.

and then the second point here is we're requesting $108,873 to fund one temporary worker to engage with departments directly on identifying responsive data and expediting the process of gathering, reviewing and redacting and releasing public data to address the existing backlog of requests and to minimize the potential to develop further backlogs into the future.

The second pilot project would enable our team to deploy a resource into our larger departments to help that department physically go through their paper records and electronic data to identify if any of that data is responsive to a request to gather it and to immediately begin the process of review, redaction, and release so that we move that forward in a faster timeline and avoid the development of future backlogs.

And again, this is a request based on the existing position classification.

And then our final request in 2025 for one-time funds is one that comes every election year.

It's a request for one-time funding to support post-election transition activities, but this year we're adding additional one-time funds of $150,000 as some contingency funding.

with the anticipated physical relocation back to City Hall following the remodeling of that space.

In every municipal election year, the Clerk's Office requests funds to support post-election transition activities, and every year we get about $200,000, so we've requested that again.

This funding is used for things associated with off-boarding non-returning officials and staff, on-boarding and orienting newly elected officials and staff, and supporting inaugural activities.

I mentioned we're also asking for a one-time infusion of $150,000 for the physical relocation to City Hall and that is a total of $350,000 in one-time requests and all of that completes the supplemental request from the Clerk's Office for fiscal year 2025.

For 2026, the Clerk's Office is requesting $948,862 in ongoing funding, which includes a total of seven new positions and a one-time allocation of $6.2 million for the planned 2026 gubernatorial election.

This first request is for one new FTE position to serve as a manager of appointed boards and commissions.

This would be a management level position to take on duties currently performed jointly by the Clerk and Assistant Clerk at higher levels of planning, coordination, and cross-enterprise organization for the City's 50-plus boards and commissions.

In 2024, thanks to Councilmember Wansley, a program coordinator position was added to handle more of the administrative and clerical functions of managing the city's numerous boards.

This position is envisioned as a program manager, a step higher.

It would supervise the program assistant, it would lead the enterprise-wide functions that are associated with recruitment, screening, and supporting nomination processes for the 700-plus seats that constitute our boards and commissions in collaboration with our appointing authorities, the mayor and council,

and our department partners and community stakeholders.

It would be responsible for planning, organizing and conducting regular orientation and onboarding programs for individuals appointed to the city's boards and commissions.

It would monitor and replace staff work group meetings, providing administrative and logistical support for the program and similar duties.

The fiscal impact is estimated at $137,776 based on the existing classification for the manager of legislative support.

The second request is for a total of five new legislative clerks to create an entry-level clerk position in the Clerk's Office that would resume responsibility for meeting management and associated clerical support for the City's appointed boards and commissions.

This new unit would accomplish multiple objectives.

First, it would create within the Clerk's Office a career ladder for legislative clerks.

This particular group would be the entry-level position.

It would provide hands-on training in the core aspects of the work, including requirements of the Minnesota Open Meeting Law, agenda management, the use of our legislative information management system, report production, parliamentary procedures, and more.

from this group then the clerk's office could promote for the second level position which are the existing clerk positions that support city council, council committees and our independent and top tier policy making bodies and from there it would be a promotional line to the chief clerk position and from thence to the assistant city clerk which leads the entire division

Second, by centralizing these functions in a dedicated team, the City benefits from the ability to train and cross-train a team focused on the management of public meetings and related procedures.

That expertise would be applied consistently and uniformly across all of the various boards, commissions, workgroups, and policymaking bodies operating within the city enterprise.

There would be consistent standards for performance in terms of agenda production and notices, calendaring, publications, reporting and record keeping, and more.

and again it would centralize that work and the required skill sets rather than diffusing it across the enterprise.

The total estimated fiscal impact for this proposal is $630,740 in fiscal year 2026.

We're also asking as an ongoing request for one new FTE Enterprise Information Management Analyst to address the increasing workload in our data practices team.

This request is basically for the second FTE that was requested but not allocated in 2024 to address the increasing demand on top of our significant backlog.

By adding this requested position, the Division expects to balance those workloads and continue to stabilize its operating procedures that were impacted by other operational budget changes, including the transfer of MPD data practice responsibilities and next, the body-worn camera review functions.

The fiscal impact estimated for this request is 130,346, again based on the existing classification.

An ongoing request is for $50,000 to support constituent services programming.

This would include, for example, ongoing funds to address a variety of initiatives included as part of our new outreach and constituent services team, including applications and systems that are being developed by that team, outreach events and activities in the community, support for language translation, which was a 2024 pilot project, and other initiatives as part of our department's focus on civic literacy and engagement.

In terms of one-time requests in the out year, the Clerk's Office is requesting a one-time allocation of $6.2 million for the gubernatorial election in 2026.

The general election that year is set for Tuesday, November 3.

You can see on this slide that the actual costs for administering the 2022 gubernatorial election cycle were $4.8 million.

So that increase we're requesting of $1.4 million from that last election cycle includes all of the same expenses that I detailed for the 2025 municipal election

including increased postage costs, wages, and the expansion of pop-up voting options with the introduction of mobile voting.

Madam Chair, that completes the presentation for the legislative department's 2025-2026 budget.

Thank you for that presentation, Mr. Carl and Mr. Pudyal.

We will now move into discussion and questions from the committee.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

My first question is for Director Pujol.

I think it was on your slide 9, but it was basically a shift in the audit department's look to insource IT skills, right, IT auditing skills.

And in my experience, when I was Chair of Audit Committee,

We felt pretty strongly that those IT needs would always really need some outside expertise simply because there wasn't one perfect person who would be able to keep up on all of the modern needs, especially around cybersecurity, but also because you and your department are auditing things like PIMS, our police management system, to traffic light software and

and others, there's just such a wide variety of IT types of needs that it would always be best to get outside expert interest.

So can you just maybe share with us some of your thinking on that a little bit more?

I wonder if maybe the past couple years there's been a collection of more common kinds of IT needs.

Thank you Chair Choctaw and CM Palasano.

So basically because whenever we're part of like not just the IT audit even when we're doing the process audit so there there could be like department and divisions who do have some of these like softwares and applications they use and anytime when we look at some of the IT audits as well majority of the time we are doing the

General control IT audit which is like more in general which we look at from the access logical access and monitoring so those are the main general control IT audits so from that perspective we thought like probably it's best to bring that in-house and typically we do when we do look at some of those systems the majority of the time that's the most

Looked upon items as a part of the IT audit, so that's why we thought like probably that's best to bring in-house So in the long run, it's more cost-saving compared to other like specific IT Audit like you said like it's been more specialized.

Thank you.

That's helpful.

My other question is a bit broader.

It's what's the total here?

Madam Chair, perhaps I can offer some assistance.

I'm not quite sure if Councilmember Palmisano is asking for only the audit section or the entire department.

This slide, as I mentioned when I presented, which is number six if you're looking at your packets, presents the total requests for the legislative department in 2025 and 2026.

So what I've done is provided in one column our base budget, which is coming to us from the Finance and Property Department.

This is our current service level.

So the base operations for existing personnel, internal operations such as rent, utilities, things of that nature.

So you can see for 2025, the legislative department's current service level or base budget is about $20.5 million.

Then I've divided into two separate columns for 2025 under supplemental requests, identifying whether they are ongoing or one time.

and total those up.

If all of those supplemental requests, both ongoing and one-time, were to be approved, it would be a total of $7.8 million, and that $7.8 million would include as well 15 full-time positions.

I separated out the FTEs because, of course, as we know, personnel is one of the most expensive pieces of the city's operating budget.

So, identifying that within that $7.8 million, that does include 15 new positions not currently included in the base budget carried over from 2024.

I don't know if that answered your question.

I would say it duplicates for 2026 as well.

I see.

Thank you.

This slide is helpful.

I will say for my colleagues that it does seem rather ambitious at a time that the mayor's office and finance have made pretty clear that we don't have a lot of extra money to be budgeted for based on decisions made at the end of the last budget session where we used one-time money or some of us voted for one-time money to satisfy ongoing needs.

So

I won't be able to support this today.

Obviously there's a lot of things in here like election costs and other clerk needs, data practices needs and that's all very important.

I'm less comfortable with the third aid idea which I don't think is actually in here.

Is that true that the third aid is not in here?

It is in here.

I mean I just think that's going beyond

Thank you council member.

I put myself in queue, wanted to just ask Mr. Carl a question regarding slide 14, which is that third aid position.

What sort of flexibility could exist for council offices within this addition of a new FTE?

So for example, if a council office determined, a council member determined

that they would prefer not to add a third FTE into their office and instead use those resources a little bit differently.

Would that be possible?

Excellent question, Madam Chair, and yes, you are correct.

The ward budget guidelines adopted by this body really direct the use of ward budget funding, and so a position that is vacant but funded, the salary component of that aid would return to the ward budget to be used within the ward budget guidelines.

That's not a free-for-all, there are a lot of regulations and restrictions on the use of public funds, but it would be a little bit more flexible and nimble in terms of how a council member might choose to use

their ward budget for constituent outreach, for community events, for newsletters, rather than an FTE.

Wonderful, thank you very much.

Thank you, Council Vice President.

You actually asked a question that I was looking to ask, too, in terms of the flexibility around using vacancy savings.

While I've definitely been a supporter of us receiving additional staff support, I also know there's a number of other ways some of us would like to utilize those dollars versus just hiring a full-time person.

So that's good to hear that there is some flexibility there.

I will also note,

some of the concerns that I have too around prioritization of ward aides over also other critical positions needed in our legislative department.

I would say personally for me I think if we're going to be adding additional 11 FTEs to our legislative department I would actually like to see those go towards expanding our legislative department's oversight and legislative capabilities.

I also would love to see each committee

standing committee in particular have a full-time policy specialist especially since you know this body is ramping up in our legislative work to be responsive to a number of critical issues from the housing crisis to the climate crisis to public safety crisis and I feel that our reliance or having to be over reliant on the administrative staff has really

I know one issue that we're dealing with is we're constantly hearing that the administrative staff is somehow struggling to fulfill our legislative directives, which are critical, you know, tools for us to, you know, acquire information needed to initiate policy or any type of legislative next steps.

So I also would love to see us

I think we need to expedite more investments into our legislative department and really thinking more targeted of where that support is needed so we can do our jobs more effectively in our legislative and oversight capacities and again to be able to reduce that reliance on the executive staff for a lot of that support.

In addition to that piece,

I'm very interested to see item number five, which is the estimated revenues and expenditures.

Nothing to do with you, Clerk Harle, but this is in regards to Council Member Palmisano's comments where I know a number of us have had these conversations around

the likely bleak financial future we're walking into come 2025 and it would be good to know how did we get there how having to pay out a lot of expenditures related to our police department which has led to almost 12% increase in basically property taxes for our employees basically the cost of government structure I mean we literally

approved, let me not say we, I did not, but we brought in a position in government structure where an individual is being paid more than the governor.

And I, quite frankly, have not seen the fruits from that position over the past two years.

So I also would love for us to have examination, I've been in conversations with Council Vice President about this, of re-examining the administrative side, specifically I know when Council Member Goodman, former Council Member Goodman was here we talked about what does it look like to re-examine our current service levels because we know also there are a number of programs that are not effective

or maybe might not be, you know, yielding the results that they should be and somehow they're still being incorporated into departments programs and ongoing budgets.

So it would be good for us in that evaluation kind of approach be able to get a sense what programs are not working, what are, let's take that money back and be able to reappropriate it to places where it matters the most.

And a lot of that

that scrutiny also needs to happen on the executive side and not make it seem that we have to basically take an anemic approach towards funding the legislative department or put them at odds with each other.

So I'm really hopeful that we have a comprehensive presentation for number five to really give us a sense of what are we walking into come 2025 when ARPA dollars are phasing out, downtown tax base is shrinking, tough dollars are running out, the cost of MPDs.

This array has also been a financial drain.

All so many, so many financial cliffs that we're walking into and off.

Thank you, Clerk Carl.

Through the chair, Councillor Cashman, I don't have that figure off the top of my head.

Okay, I think it was discussed a few weeks back.

Just wondering how that factors in here because that was a huge expense.

It's about 50% right?

Correct.

For election and voter services and obviously that's a really important thing for us to fund for our democracy for voter safety and ability to vote and I

at a very high level on operations and then move to the even year proposal.

In terms of operations, the elections budget has two major components.

The base component is the permanent staffing, the rent, the facilities, utilities, sort of what it takes to keep the lights on at that facility and operating.

And then every year we come and get the, what I'll call the election budget.

So we operate on a four-year election cycle, presidential, municipal, gubernatorial, and an off-year.

But we could have specials, right?

So in those four-year cycles, we come in front of the council and, based on a number of factors, present the election year budget, which is then on top of the base budget, which pays for the elections division, regardless of whether it's an election that year or not.

So there are two components of that.

and the costs for our operating facility, the rent for that facility on Henpen Avenue is part of that base budget.

I can get all that information and circulate that in a response memo to the body that shows how that base budget in elections breaks out and that will address the question on facilities.

In terms of the even year election proposal that the charter commission was discussing, we've presented multiple times to them.

I should first share, this is a public meeting so this serves as a sort of notice, that meeting was cancelled hours ago based on some action at the state legislature which would be necessary for us to move municipal elections into an even numbered year.

I know that the charter commission had noticed the public hearing on Wednesday.

That's been cancelled.

My anticipation is that that proposal will sort of not move forward pending the ability to have multiple page ballots.

So that's one issue.

In terms of the operating costs, however, there would be a savings to the city if we consolidated city elections into an even-numbered year.

And that was a question the charter commission asked us, and we anticipated we'd save anywhere between I think it was $1.5 and $2 million.

over that four-year cycle.

So that's not every year.

That's over the regular four-year cycle.

I do support a third ward office staff member just because of the volume of constituent contact that we have in our office hundreds if not thousands each week and

our duty as council members is to be transparent to share information with our constituents about what we're doing and to be able to process their input on a daily basis and make sure that they're being heard and being able to participate in our democracy and that's what I think that additional capacity would provide at least my office with more ability to do but I'm also really interested in council member Wonsley's proposal of having policy specific staff members in each standing committee

I was wondering if you have any insight about how the state legislature's policy and research teams operate in terms of their standing committees.

I know it's a much larger scale, but I know that their research teams are incredibly expansive and very useful to their work.

through the chair I'll say I do and this is probably a much longer conversation so I'll give an abbreviated version and happy to follow up.

The auditor's office, let's all start with the state.

The state legislature provides two different kinds of staffing to their operations.

They have partisan staff who work for the two parties and then they have non-partisan staff that provide that non-partisan research, analytical and information management services.

So it's a combination of both partisan and non-partisan staffs that are funded at the legislative

and the State.

I will say that the auditor's policy and research team did a high-level but fairly thorough job, and I can get you this information, it's in limbs, of analyzing what they called the landscape of similar jurisdictions, different cities of our size comparable that operate under a executive mayor legislative council structure, and specifically tailoring in on what is the staffing resource and capacity provided for the legislative body, both in terms of

for example, staff for council members, professional staff that serve the body, and that type of matter.

I think that's a really good starting point for this continuing conversation about resources for the legislative department and would bring your attention back to that.

I think that there are opportunities to think more broadly about staffing.

We haven't had that conversation for a variety of reasons, one of which is just time.

Time escapes us.

but for example there are some cities that benchmark that we would benchmark against that don't necessarily allocate a specific set of FTE numbers to council members but instead provide for example an operating budget and within that budget you hire whatever staffing works with that and so that provides a maximum amount of flexibility to a council member

having specific FTEs that are in a set range provides a little bit more structure but also imposes some limitations to that.

So I think that in terms of resourcing the council and separately but relatedly resourcing the legislative department there are options that we could discuss.

I think it's good for us to have these conversations up front initially because there's a lot of time until the final budget comes in December.

and it may be that the slides we're presenting today are not the final answer, but at least it generates that conversation about what types of resources does the council, both in terms of its members and then the council in terms of a permanent body, an institution if you will, need to perform its official duties.

Thank you so much.

Chair Tuktai had to step up for a minute so I'll take over.

Thank you, Vice Chair Koski.

I first want to say thank you so much for the presentation, just sharing out the work of our legislative department financially, what it's been looking like.

Just looking to, I believe,

slide four.

I appreciated the visual on the increased investment and allocation within our legislative department, particularly

the clerk and auditor's office.

I was hoping, Mr. Carl, if you could kind of speak to the challenges associated with new government structure the last few years that kind of led to asking for increased allocations and then with the increased allocations in 2023, 2024, what improvements have we seen?

Through the Chair, I'll say at a high level with government structure, a lot of these investments or the increase in budget, which I think represent investments, show the Council's prioritization of new functions that heretofore were not provided by the legislative department.

So that primarily would include the Policy and Research Division of the Auditor's Office and the new Oversight and Evaluation Division.

And as those functions of those divisions mature and become more refined and more known,

The intention behind that is to provide the entire body with a professional non-partisan resource to help with policy making, with oversight, evaluating city performance.

So the council as a legislative body sets forward goals, funds the operation of the department, and says these are the outcomes we want to see on behalf of our residents.

In a representational capacity, you give voice.

I always like to say the council is the proxy of the people, right?

You speak for your constituents.

And so in supporting those functions, we believe, Mr. Patrick and I, the former city auditor, it was important to develop some professional capacity within our own department under the control of the council through an independent audit committee

to support policy making, oversight, fiscal policies, fiscal operations, those types of things which are within the purview of the council.

And I think that those investments which have been significant and have been a major factor of increase in our department budget in the last two fiscal years speak to both the division under government structure but also the recognition of important investments to support council in that policy making work.

So I'll say that for that component.

In terms of the future, both the auditor and I presented in 2022 and 2023 a long-term plan for staffing out the department.

We've been working against that plan.

Some of those, as I think Councilmember Palmisano mentioned, some of those investments that were tiered out over multiple years happened faster.

Some of them didn't happen yet, but are still on our plan to get us to where we think, as your professional staff, the auditor and clerk,

what would be helpful to get us started.

Certainly, we can't see the future and what, you know, ten years from now might be, but right now I think the increases that have been given through those investments are sufficient to allow us to set a baseline.

Thank You mr. Mr. Carl, I appreciate it through the chair just a Another follow-up to that question.

I'm wondering if you can kind of get into some specificity around What kind of improvements these additional roles to the clerk's department you are the head head clerk So you see the day-to-day and you manage your staff?

would create and kind of

the solution it would provide.

Certainly, and through the chair, I would say the requests we put forward are to continue trends that I think I'm most proud of during my tenure as clerk, which is to really professionalize that office.

We've talked about in the out year creating an entry level clerk position that would provide a career growth ladder within the legislative division for clerking.

that would allow us to expand and provide uniformly and consistently across the enterprise to all of our decision making public bodies the same level of expertise that the clerks bring to the council.

So that's one aspect of future investments that we're looking to do.

In terms of the administrative and operations team, we've added the first components of a much larger envisioned outreach and constituent services team with our two constituent services project coordinators.

the role there is really to help amplify the work of council to provide recognition of what is council doing and how does it relate to my life and the city and how are opportunities available to me to participate in that decision making or to engage in what government is doing and to know about that so that work is just starting out

on the administration side.

We talked about adding a program administrative program coordinator.

That's to really flesh out that team that serves as sort of what I'll call the heart of the whole department.

Everything that we do as a department flows through that very small team.

And so having those positions reclassified and then opening them and recruiting really skilled people

to bring that professional level to our administrative team is important to us this year.

So that'll be a function that we're bringing forward and we're asking to add the third position to the team.

We currently have the two.

We've always envisioned the three.

Elections team, we're not asking for any FTEs.

They're pretty solid there, but their operations are expensive.

The work they do is important.

Government begins at the ballot box.

I don't think, I would not anticipate any disagreement from the council.

How we get there and how we maybe save on our operations is certainly always up for debate.

One of the reasons we bring the election budget out separately to really monitor those costs, is it necessary to do all of the outreach that we do?

No.

But we do it because we know it makes a difference.

But could we do it more effectively and efficiently?

Sure.

That's always on the table for discussion.

In terms of our records and information division, it's really seen huge expansions, especially since we consolidated the entire city into that group for data practices.

Data practices overwhelmed them.

We operated for the last several years with no records managers on the team, and so we now have two.

That's really important because records management gets upstream from data practices.

Records management is the function that talks about what data are we creating?

How long do we have to keep it?

Can we get rid of it?

How do we get rid of it?

and there are laws that govern all of that.

So having those two records managers who just started last year is critical and one of the first things they're doing with monies thanks to this council you gave us last year was redoing an enterprise-wide retention schedule so that literally every piece of data we create is tied to a retention schedule so that we can eliminate it when we no longer legally have to keep it.

and so that's the kind of professional work I would say these investments represent.

It's the creation of a new retention schedule.

It's the professionalization of our administrative operation that serves the entire department.

It's the unification of clerk functions across an enterprise.

It's getting the ballot out into the community and taking the ballot to the voters.

Thank you.

No, I really appreciated that and it just it's helpful to kind of see through your eyes a little bit about how how the clerk's department is working how it relates to election voter services and just adding a little bit more to that day-to-day value that people provide, right?

It's people that are behind this work and I've certainly both seen as a council member and

former policy aide before the pandemic through the pandemic until now like the amount of work that the clerk's office elections has taken on so it's just it's good to hear and it gives me a little bit more insight and thinking about

this year's budget regarding our legislative department.

I'm also excited to hear about the mobile election ban.

I think that is a very innovative idea and I think going out into community is actually how you create voter expansion and imagining that's early voting.

So really appreciate that I'm interested in learning more offline and how that will work.

I'll just kind of close my comments Other council members have touched on this ongoing request for the third aid So I just I took a look at that and just wanted to share my perspective to the body as we're making budgeting decisions I

I have served as policy aide to multiple offices of varying demand and served through the COVID-19 pandemic.

And while there is a lot of demand on our council offices, at this point I'm on the side of thinking I'm not necessarily seeing the value of an additional

Third Aid.

I like the ideas that were brought forward on onto the day is today around flexibility around ward budget.

I believe we get a ward budget of 10,000 every year that rolls over.

I have seen in council offices that I've been within using some of that funding for additional part-time staffing to add capacity.

I like the idea of potentially doubling that so it's

20,000 and that would look more like an increase of, if we're doing 20,000 for every, an additional 10,000 for every 13 offices, 130,000.

Hopefully have the math correct on that as a way to add some capacity.

But I just wanted to note, just from the perspective of now Council Member managing policy aids, being a policy aid, I know Council Member

Jenkins has been a policy aide before.

This is a request that I'm feeling hesitant about, and I think there's other ways for us to potentially look at using this funding in part, sending it back to the cash balance, general fund, whatever feels best fit.

Thank you.

I'll note we've got about an hour and 15 minutes or so left in this room and two pretty significant items coming after.

So to everyone involved, both the presenters and council members, if you can keep your comments as brief as possible.

I want to allow time for everyone to get to their questions.

Thank you, Chair.

I'll be quick.

I have just some comments about kind of the conversation we're having about the additional aid.

Previously, I thought for sure it's something my office can use because there's been a huge amount of constituent services that's needed.

The government structure did exactly what I wanted it to do, provide an opportunity for me and my office to spend more time

on Constituent Services.

I think what I have an issue with is there's been these issues I hadn't anticipated coming up in the council and we're only five months in and the level of constituent services has went up tremendously from

So when I think about the third aid, I think about the amount of attention I can give to my constituents, and it's not always just yours.

Sometimes when you publicly speak about an issue, if someone lives in a different part of the city but they agree with you, they reach out and they want a response too.

And so I've seen a lot of that happening.

also I'd be interested to hear what the president and the vice president have to say what are positives or not so positive things about having a third staffer they both have one now this term so I'd love to hear from them about how this is working out I love the election van I think it's a really good idea for you to build the

Clerk Department up.

The clerks are essential to this work.

I don't know that I agree with having additional staff, you know, assigned to committees because that even gets complicated.

That is what I would use the third staff for if I, you know, like if I'm on a committee I would use that person as the person to pay attention to those issues in the committees that I'm on or also to pay attention to.

to the things within the legislative administrative departments that I need.

And so I thought for sure I was 100% sold on this.

You've given us a great presentation.

I am going to take some time to think a little bit further about the options you've put before us and really, you know, figure out what's most important for the city right now.

Thank you, Councilmember.

Next I'll recognize Councilmember Cashman.

Thank you for Councilmember Rainville.

Thank you Councilmember.

Thank you Mr.

Clerk.

Thank you so much for the presentation.

You're always very thorough have all the details.

It's very helpful and pictures and all the things Question about the election services.

I know that we are having conversations about potentially moving that to the former third precinct Does that I'm assuming that the numbers that you have here don't include any

Through the Chair, Vice Chair Koski, I don't.

We could certainly work with Property Services to do a comparison.

We have our known costs for the rental, the facilities we're in now.

And Property Services can, I think, make an informed guess about what operations would be for a new facility at that site.

But I don't have that information.

Okay, I think that would be helpful.

I also want to add the accolades about the mobile election services I think that is just I know that that's been on the list for quite some time you might be able to advise it how long but it's been quite some time that we have been waiting for that and I do want to be really cognizant about how we are spending and what we are thinking about in the legislative

on the Legislative Department budget.

I appreciate the slide.

I don't know what it is.

It shows you the circle here about what percentage we are of the entire city budget and our job is to have oversight and in order to do that and we did and the voters asked us to have a checks and balance type of government and so that is what we have been doing is continuing to build that out and so I think we have comments about how much the council wants to

So that is why I appreciate

However, the conversation around the ward budgets and this third aid and I think I don't support today going into this and saying yes I will rubber stamp this third aid but what I do support is us to continue this broader conversation I think, like you said, time is limited and we haven't been able to have those conversations about how

We think about what's the outcomes we're trying to achieve here and I think every ward is different.

Every ward is unique.

That's why we are all unique 13 individuals up here and you know, so what are the outcomes that each ward and what are the demands of each ward and they might vary a little bit and we have been stagnant with a $10,000 ward budget.

I am it's very difficult.

I've had to you know, we pay for

our printer ink out of that, our AIDS telephones.

The $10,000 goes very quickly.

Any kind of conference we might want to go to, a printed newsletter, which I have yet to been able to do because of the amount of individuals and households that are in Ward 11 that we know the addresses, that would

over-extend

budget and what that looks like is appropriate so I'm open to continuing that I've heard many varying opinions today about what's important for them and I think that's the

Thank you.

Thank you Chair Chuktai.

I am also going to just talk a little bit about this third aid role and I have long been a proponent of a third aid and as has been mentioned and as many of you know I have served as a policy aid for a very long time.

but you know now one of the reasons why I always thought we needed a third aid is to do policy research now we have an entire department that's called policy and research that does that potentially for us and so

It diminishes, in my mind, the need for a third aid.

Though, you know, as has been stated, each ward has different needs, different dynamics.

I did send out a printed newsletter one year and it took up two-thirds of my entire

I'm curious if anyone can answer

But, yeah, I guess I would be uncomfortable if departments just decided, oh, we don't want that FTE that you came to us and asked us for and then we're going to just spend it on something else.

That would be a bit of a concern and I think that would be a

a very concerning precedent for the council to set as well.

But that concludes my remarks.

Thank you Councilmember.

To answer your question more directly and we'll have the CFO dig into this during the current service level presentation.

But yes, they can see savings departments are able to use right now.

That precedent actually does exist and it happens far more on the administrative side for context.

Thank you Chair Chuck Tine, Council Vice President.

I just want to talk a little bit about this third aid.

I'm in favor of exploring this option.

I want to make sure that at a minimum that we explore what this could look like for this body.

I just want to name that some of us represent wards that are communicating different languages and engagement is really important.

When I have two aides, it's very complicated to go into Ward 9 and talk to people that speak Somali, that speak Spanish, and that aren't always able to communicate with everybody that we represent.

And what I see this third aide as a possibility is with that engagement component.

Newsletters, emails,

phone calls isn't enough to communicate with some of our most vulnerable residents in the city of Minneapolis and I'll talk about my residence at Ward 9 and the way I need to communicate with my residents oftentimes is door knocking on the official side and asking them on a one-to-one conversation what do you need from your council member because they don't get my newsletters, they don't see my Facebook posts, they don't see why I tweet, they don't see my newsletters, they don't get engaged in this capacity

and in order for them to actually get engaged they need a one-to-one service meaning someone in their backyard which is why I do a lot of door knocking on my official capacity and it takes a lot of time for me personally to do that work at City Hall and then go back after work and figure out how I can engage with these communities, right?

I spent a long time doing Spanish events yesterday with a lot of the Latino community members in my ward and

got to figure out how I can continue doing that to represent them well, right?

So I'm in favor of exploring this, seeing what it could look like.

I do like the idea of like what the flexibility could look like.

The part that I appreciate the most is the engagement component, or what does it look like to actually like serve like the green zones, like particularly Ward 4, 5, 6, 9, I'll name those, the areas that like, you know, need a lot more engagement because you serve different residents.

So yeah, I mean I like the potential of exploring this or seeing what it could look like.

Thank you.

That brings discussion on this item to an end and I, just listening to feedback from council members, I think I have a proposal of how we're going to move forward.

First we'll have the clerks receive and file this presentation and the 25-26 legislative department budget proposal.

Now on the second part about the associated direction to the Council President and Vice President on the proposed or recommended budget.

I think it is possible for us to incorporate some of the feedback that we're hearing today.

And we've seen several council members name that they walked in with an idea in mind and upon hearing some of the feedback and discussion here, it's changed their perspective a little bit.

So I think it might make sense to hold on the associated direction for a cycle, see if we can work with the city clerk

and council members who've brought up some of these ideas over the course of this upcoming cycle and if we can maybe bring back a proposal that's better supported or has more interest from the council and move forward in that way so we can all be united around supporting the legislative department's broader budget.

Does that sound okay?

I'm seeing some nods.

Okay, wonderful.

With that, then we'll ask the Clerk to receive and file this report and we will be back next cycle to move approval of the associated direction on this budget which will get us lined up with Council budget priorities and still get all of these budgets back to the Mayor prior to the July 1st deadline as outlined in the Charter.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Our next item is receiving and filing a report on estimated revenue and expenditures for the 2025-2026 budget.

I will invite our Budget Director Jane DeCenza from the Finance Department to begin that presentation.

This is going to be a longer presentation as well, so we will ask that you hold questions until the end.

Thank you so much.

Good afternoon Council Vice President Chugthai, members of the committee.

My name is Jane DeSensa, I'm the Budget Director within Finance and Property Services and we are here today with members of the budget team to talk to you about the 2025-2026 current service level budget calculations.

So these are the estimated revenues and expenses that serve as the starting point for budget decision making over the summer.

The information in these slides is the result of many months of work by our team as well as our partners throughout the city enterprise.

This is a technical presentation.

It's focused on future forecasts, future revenue and expenses.

And you can expect to hear from departments as part of the Budget Committee's work in September and October about their operational decisions.

So throughout these slides, you're going to see prior year actual spending.

That's included as a reference along with the 2025 and 2026 figures.

And you will hear from many, but not all of the team today.

So I just want to take a second to introduce the folks who are over here to my right.

First of all, Justin Coles is the budget manager.

Ben Zimmerman is here.

He supports the development health and livability portfolio.

Justin Carlson is out at grad school today, but he supports the administrative and legislative departments.

Megan Bersch is our internal service and enterprise funds expert.

Dustin Leslie recently joined our team as the grants analyst.

Lindsey Erdmann does policy and engagement work.

We are also led by our CFO, Tijani Dai, who's sitting right over there.

And finally, wanted to thank our visiting scholar, Enos Mustafa, who's joined us for the past several months as a visiting scholar with the Humphrey International Fellows Program.

She's been helping us research financial policies.

Okay, so this is a brief walkthrough of our plan for today.

So we want to take you through the budget framework.

We'll be walking you through all the various components, the building blocks of the budget, so that you understand the journey from December of 2023 until now.

We'll review the expense drivers, why we're seeing the numbers we're seeing, as well as the revenue forecast, and we'll close things out with putting it all together with a summary of the general fund outlook along with the next steps.

So I'll just move us into some budget info.

I'll touch on some financial overview elements and also just some grounding about the broader context of the budget.

So first and foremost, the current service level is a snapshot in time of the budget.

It is not a recommendation.

There's no decision points within this budget.

The city, as it always does, will present a balanced budget for the mayor's recommended budget in August.

So the work of finance throughout the summer is to get us to that balanced budget.

This is a snapshot, so not all funds are fully locked in at this point.

We are still finalizing grants, funds, capital, enterprise, and downtown assets.

But what we are seeing when we look at all funds at this point is that expenses and revenues are growing at modest rates.

The difference is when we drill down into the general fund, we are seeing expenses decline 0.48%, but revenues are decreasing 3.64%.

So that means that we have a significant gap, more than usual, between the revenues and the expenses in the General Fund.

And that is largely due to the increasing cost of personnel, some internal services, along with some decreasing revenues.

It is often the case at this stage of the budget that we see a gap between revenues and expenses.

This is just a more significant one than we're used to.

This is similar in other cities across the country, but our situation is far less drastic.

You'll notice that general fund decreasing.

Part of it on the revenue side is associated with the end of ARPA.

So we've long been planning for the end of ARPA in 2025.

We're at that point.

The past several years we've been able to use ARPA as revenue replacement to sustain general fund operations and we're simply at the end of that time.

We're also in a much different labor environment than we were at the height of the pandemic.

Personnel costs are increasing, and so our personal budgets have to increase accordingly.

So again, I want to emphasize there are a number of decision points throughout the summer that will get us to a balanced budget in August.

For some context, as we talk about the general fund, this pie chart just sort of situates the general fund with the other funds that comprise the overall expense budget.

So the general fund is the dark blue, the $682 million.

That's out of $1.72 billion in the current service level.

So that's about 40%.

General fund is predominantly property tax supported.

And so that is the fund that decision makers on the diets are going to encounter the most frequently.

If you're curious about the other funds, they are all described in detail in the budget book.

This next slide shows you a summary of the capital improvement program.

So there are no changes presented on this slide.

It's as adopted in December of last year.

But I wanted to include it because infrastructure is one way that residents interact with city government on a regular and routine basis.

And so it's really important for the people that live here.

It's also where we have some really clear participation in public participation and decision making.

The Capital Long Range Improvement Committee, which is supported by the budget division, is the resident committee that reviews and ranks all the capital budget requests from city departments as well as the park board and the municipal building commission.

They have heard presentations on 130 projects so far, and they will be ranking those in the coming weeks and delivering a recommendation to the mayor, which then largely informs his proposal in August, which then makes its way to you.

So when we're looking at this slide, the planned 2025 column is what you can think of as the capital current service level, $258 million.

And just to slice the data a different way, this is a departmental view of all funds expenses.

We're not spending much time in this presentation going department by department.

That's really the work of the Budget Committee in the fall.

But we wanted to include this as a reference as you're starting to get oriented to the budget decisions that are to come.

Again, this is just a snapshot.

It doesn't have any new decisions baked into it.

But it's the cost of continuing forward the ongoing commitments.

and I should note that this is just the operating department's view.

There are other budget categories that go into the broader budget but these are the departments that people are used to seeing.

Okay, at this point we'll start to transition into some more details about the current service level.

So we're going to talk to you today about what the current service level is, how do we calculate it.

We'll get into each component part so that you understand why the numbers are going up or down.

And throughout these slides you're going to see references to our financial policies.

So we provide those references so that you can dig in further if you wish.

As a reminder, our policies are, of course, voted on by all of you and are informed by industry best practices.

So we look to the Government Finance Officers Association as well as GAP and city and state ordinances.

The CSL presentation does not bind the Council to any action regarding the budget in the future, but explains where we are at as of today.

The following information I will share about what the CSL is on this slide is derived from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

The CSL serves

It's a reality check in the budget process.

It indicates what the city would have to spend on a given program to maintain the program at its current service level in the absence of any policy changes.

It reflects the impact of factors that cause year-to-year variations in the cost of providing a given service.

such as inflation, changing wage levels, population growth, and economic and demographic shifts, as well as inactive policy changes that have yet to take effect.

The CSL is essential for budget transparency and accountability because it lets the public see what the budget really does and then hold their elected officials accountable for those changes.

The CSL is a budget methodology and also a method of calculating, which is used by states and other municipalities across the country.

The CSL is a baseline projection and tells how much it will cost the city to deliver the same services and goods in the following year.

It's also important to note that what the CSL is not.

The CSL is not a tool or methodology for conducting a retroactive analysis into previous year's spending, rather it's a tool to prepare for the future.

Historical data can be used as a reference point rather than a mechanism to do a deep dive into specific program areas.

So in summary, the CSL is used for understanding the fiscal impact of future policy changes.

Without a baseline, it's hard to see the effect of future policy changes.

The figures my team will present today are snapshot in time, but they are crucial for decision-making around the property tax levy

Okay, so as we discussed the city uses the current service level method of budgeting and calculating as defined by our financial policies 1.5.1 which states that the budget process is intended to weigh all competing requests for city resources with an expected fiscal constraints.

Requests for new programs or activities or expansions of existing programs or activities must be submitted as a part of the budget process.

The CSL can be simply defined as utilizing any ongoing base commitments from a prior year as a starting point for the following.

The key point here is the continuation of current services into each subsequent year.

There are three expense components that make up the current service level budget in addition to revenues, which is how the city pays for its CSL.

The three expense categories are personnel.

This includes all of the wages and fringe expenses for enterprise staff.

Personnel is inflated year to year to account for plan step increases, cost of living adjustments, and labor settlement agreements.

Then there's base expenses.

These are all other non-personnel expenses and these are held flat year to year.

Then we have internal service charges.

Internal service departments provide goods and services to customer departments within the city to account for the cost of a variety of services including fleet, rent, liability insurance and others.

Internal service charges are adjusted year to year based on anticipated costs of these overhead goods and services.

While we can conceptually think about using the 2024 adopted budget as a starting place to plan for 2025, there are many departments and their staff involved in validating budget data that is carried over from one year to the next.

So in order to develop the 2025 CSL, many processes occur concurrently, placing great demand on departments, and we'd like to acknowledge and thank departments for the time and effort that they contribute to budget development as well.

Additionally, the CSL development processes are guided by the City's financial policies which are reviewed and adopted by the City Council.

The specific policies will be called out on subsequent slides where they direct these budget processes.

So looking at the left-hand side of the slide, we see the graphic of the 2024 adopted budget components.

So we begin 2025 CSL development using 2024 adopted budget data from these four components, personnel, base expenses, internal service charges, and revenues.

We start the CSL development process with budget kickoff.

Policy priorities, budget capacity, and the overall budget development process are discussed with departments so they can begin crafting their budget proposals for new programs or activities.

Then, one-time expenditures are removed from the 2024 adopted budget, so only ongoing expenditures are included in the 2025 CSL.

Then personnel expenses go through an annual review.

This review is pertinent as these expenses are in a significant portion of the total operating budget and do fluctuate year to year.

Additionally budget and HR have been working closely to both improve the accuracy of our data on existing staffing levels and compensation as well as to make sound projections for future growth.

Next is the Internal Service Fund allocation process.

During this process, provider departments estimate their expenses providing goods and services to their customer departments.

Then provider departments allocate out those costs according to the allocation models.

Lastly, customer departments review these charges for inclusion into the CSL.

We also forecast 2025 revenues.

Revenue forecasts are based on collaboration between departments and the budget division in which impacts on revenue streams are assessed.

These impacts include generally how sensitive or stable those revenue streams are, assessing if there are trends in growth or decline, are there new revenue sources, and also looking at internal and external drivers.

to ultimately determine the next 2025 to 2030 outlook, which will be finalized sometime in August.

Each of these processes has either been completed or is underway as we develop the 2025 CSL and the revenue forecast.

It's important to remember CSL development is where we are as of today and there are several other processes in queue as we develop the 2025 mayor's recommended budget.

Good afternoon, Council Vice President Chug Thai, members of the committee.

As Lindsay mentioned, my name is Justin Coles.

I'm the city's budget manager.

Over the next few slides, we'll be diving into a snapshot of the current service level, first for 25 and then as well as the plan for 2026.

While this is just one side of the budget, it's prudent to understand the current cost of the 24 budget before turning how to fund those expenses.

Most of this slide before you is focused on the general fund, as that is where a majority of our programs are budgeted.

It's heavily supported by the property tax levy, and it's where the mayor and you all make strategic decisions to get us to an adopted budget in December.

It's important to note here that this is the cost of last year's budget rolled forward today, and it does not include any new spending or bringing grant-funded programs, which are temporary in nature, into ongoing funding within the general fund.

Across all city funds, the budget team identified and removed $43.3 million of one-time or expiring programs on the road to building the CSL.

This is inclusive of one-time funding adopted for 2024, as well as other components of the budget that are expiring this year.

The removal was in line with the five-year plan included in the 2024 budget.

So it can really be seen more as a technical necessity towards building the 25 budget and not additional savings towards balancing.

Collectively, salary, overtime, other pays and fringe costs increased by $24 million when compared to the 24 adopted budget.

Internal service charges increased $9.1 million at the same time frame.

As you can see in this visualization, when comparing the 24 adopted to the 2025 CSL view, increases in salaries and other pays and fringe were smoothed out by reductions in contractual services related to those one-time spending items being removed.

The use of one-time programs is one way to keep the budget flexible.

When we free up that capacity after a year, we can be more responsive to innovative ideas and pilots as they become presented.

As Lindsay mentioned, while policy allows for cost escalation within two of the three categories that make up a department's budget, the base does not receive that same treatment.

The base in most cases is held flat year to year to ensure that the executive and legislative bodies receive requests to increase a department's discretionary budget and can equitably consider those amongst all other budget requests.

This portion of the budget includes things like training, travel, contracts, and operating supplies.

If a department wants to increase their base, whether it be to cover existing programs or put forth new, they submit a new budget proposal to do so and it gets reviewed alongside all others.

This guideline is called out in Financial Policy 1.5.1, which has been stated can be found in our 24 budget book online.

Council President Chagchai, Council members, my name is Megan Bersch and I'm the budget analyst supporting our internal service and enterprise funds portfolio.

I'll be discussing the other two components of our 2025 current service level expense budget, personnel and internal service costs.

So I'll get started with personnel.

So with over 4,000 FTEs budgeted for in the city, personnel is a significant portion of total city operating costs.

We work closely with our partners in human resources and departments to complete our annual review of personnel expenses in accordance with our financial policies, finalizing budgeted FTE counts and salary and fringe for each position to develop a comprehensive position-by-position workforce plan for the enterprise.

Salary and fringe expenses have both increased in the 2025 CSL over what was included in the 2024 adopted budget.

Growth in salaries is outpacing growth in fringe expenses driven by collective bargaining agreements being settled at salary increases higher than what was historically negotiated.

These agreements impact both step and cost of living adjustments for positions represented by each bargaining unit.

The budget division plans for annual increases in personnel costs based on growth assumptions that we revisit annually in collaboration with human resources.

The 2025 CSL General Fund budget for personnel is about $23 million higher than planned, though after accounting for budget planning from 2024 and other offsets identified for 2025, that discrepancy is reduced to about $10 million.

Again, this is a reflection of larger than budgeted COLAs negotiated in contracts settled between our 2024 Workforce Plan update and this one that we are now adjusting the 2025 CSL to reflect.

As more collective bargaining agreements are settled under the leadership of the HR Labor Relations Division, we'll continue to account for the associated growth in the personnel portion of the CSL.

As a final note, I also just want to take a step back and address what appears to be a significant increase in personnel costs between our 2022 and 2023 actuals and then our 2024 and ongoing budgets.

This is primarily due to differences between the accounts where we budget salary and fringe and the accounts that they're ultimately paid out of.

This graph only shows the accounts where we budget salary and fringe, which would exclude some components of actual personnel spending.

And now moving on to internal service charges.

Internal service departments and funds are those that provide goods and services to other departments within the enterprise.

IT, the Fleet Division of Public Works, Property Services, and the Workers' Compensation and Liability components of self-insurance are the ones we're discussing here because they use models to distribute their costs enterprise-wide.

These departments first estimate their expenses to carry out their work for the coming year and then allocate them out to customer departments as determined by each internal service department's allocation model.

Costs and cost distributions are determined using considerations such as customer department FTE counts, information on historical actuals, identified department specific projects and needs, and for workers comp and liability, a report from our actuarial consultant, Pinnacle.

The graph here shows charges specifically to general fund departments.

Changes in internal service charges to the general fund between the 2024 adopted budget and the 2025 CSL,

are the result of a few primary drivers.

In fleet, charges are increasing primarily because the cost of vehicles has increased dramatically over the last few years.

Public Works' Fleet Division attempts to collect enough internal service charges to spread the impact of planned vehicle replacements over many years, but the scale is such that it can still have pretty large annual impacts.

Property services rent charges are increasing due in part to a redesign of the rent model in 2025.

The previous property services rent model did not collect enough to cover its costs, so it was redesigned this year to improve cost recovery for the comprehensive facilities work that Property Services does.

The other major component of the rent charge increase is changes in maintenance and custodial costs due to the fluctuation of occupancy rates in various city buildings and buildings coming on and offline.

Workers compensation charges are increasing based on the annual third-party actuarial report projecting claims the city will pay out in future years based on past year's actuals.

Workers compensation charges were adjusted upwards to reflect the projected increase in 2025 claims paid from that report.

and then finally, IT charges are decreasing due to a planned out-year decrease in the HRAS Phase 2 new budget proposal that was approved and included in the 2023 adopted budget.

The funding for that ends in 2024, so it was removed.

I also just want to note that changes in personnel costs also have an effect on internal service charges because the personnel costs of each internal service department are allocated through their respective models.

As I discussed on the previous slide, collective bargaining agreements are being settled at salary increases higher than what was historically negotiated.

As personnel costs in IT, the Fleet Division of Public Works, and the Property Services and Risk Management Divisions of Finance increase, their internal service charges have to increase as well to cover those costs.

After all of these internal service cost drivers are taken into account, internal service charges to the general fund are increasing by a net of about $9.1 million between the 2024 adopted budget and the 2025 CSL.

General fund departments are provided the budget to pay for their internal service charges each year per our financial policies, so changes to their charges either up or down have no operational impacts to those departments.

All right, Council Vice President Chigtai, Council Members, my name is Ben Zimmerman and I'm the budget analyst that facilitates revenue forecasting.

To this point, we have largely focused on CSL expenses and now we'll transition to hear about how we're paying for the CSL by looking at our revenue forecasts.

On this slide, I'm showing a roadmap for the funds and revenue types we will be unpacking in a bit more detail.

We will largely focus on the general fund and some key revenues there because again that is where most decision-making is made by city leadership As was noted earlier in this presentation revenue forecasts are developed through extensive collaboration with subject matter experts throughout the city So I do want to give a quick thank you to the dozens of individuals citywide who have informed the revenue outlook

Before getting into the general fund, a very quick look at enterprise-wide revenues into all funds.

This includes the general fund, the special revenue funds, debt funds, etc.

I will note that enterprise funds, grant funds, downtown assets, and capital are still under development, and that is just a reality of data availability and the timing of our budget process.

Most of these should be finalized in June and the rest in July.

One thing worth highlighting is that the primary driver of the steep drop off in revenues from 2022 and 2023 into 2024 is that ARPA revenue falling off.

The slide before you now is focusing specifically on the General Fund, and before we get into a discussion of General Fund revenues from outside the city, think taxes, state aid, license and permit revenue, it's important to highlight how transfers into the General Fund are used to stabilize the General Fund activities.

While any given year there might be a few different transfers into the General Fund, this slide is oriented around each year's primary transfer.

Prior to COVID, the primary transfer was approximately $32 million from the Downtown Assets Fund.

The Downtown Assets Fund was hit particularly hard by COVID and transfers dipped as low as $11 million annually to allow the downtown assets to stabilize.

From 2022 until 2024, the primary transfer was ARPA.

The current year ARPA transfer is $36.3 million.

And in 2025, you are seeing the ARPA transfer falling off completely and the Downtown Assets Fund transfer ramping back up to roughly that pre-pandemic level of $32 million.

So the net impact of the ARPA reduction and the downtown assets increase,

moves us from a $60 million in total transfers in 2024 down to $33 million in 2025 or a $27 million drop of transfers into the general fund.

Before moving on to the general fund revenues, a very brief slide on local option sales taxes, which are the primary revenue into the downtown assets fund.

It's important to understand the health of that revenue and fund because it is the primary source for that transfer moving forward beginning in 2025.

This visual is showing net lost revenues, but generally speaking it is easier to talk about gross local option sales tax revenues because it makes for more of an apples to apples comparison.

That is because in the past five years there have been substantive shifts in what has been withheld annually for purposes of things like U.S. bank stadium debt and State Department of Revenue administrative costs.

So in terms of the gross revenues, after nearly hitting pre-pandemic revenues in 2022, we well surpassed them in 2023.

More specifically, in 2018 and 19, we had about $92 million in gross revenue.

And in 2023, that hit $100 million.

All of that after bottoming out around $51 million in 2020.

We are forecasting 3.5% growth in 2025, which is $3.2 million in additional net revenue.

and on to the General Fund.

So, again, we are focusing largely on General Fund revenues and the prior two slides were meant to highlight the importance of transfers into the General Fund and the noteworthy revenues supporting those transfers.

Here we are back with a look at the General Fund and excluding those transfers and use of cash to focus on external revenues.

Again, the General Fund is the primary focus because it has the most flexibility in terms of use and it is where most city leadership and policy decision-making occurs.

The outlook for 2025 remains slightly positive, though you can see in the visual that growth is forecasted to slow.

Specifically, we are forecasting 1% year-over-year growth.

And this is a little different than the last two years where there was generally a more consistent outlook of revenues increasing.

This year we're seeing a few notable increases and decreases which are netting out to this modest growth.

So some of the notable increasing revenues are taxes, non-operating revenue, which is our interest revenue, and business license and permit revenue.

And then some notable decreasing revenues are intergovernmental revenue and our non-business license and permit revenue.

I've highlighted taxes and intergovernmental revenue because they are the two largest revenue categories in the general fund.

So we have a slide for each to unpack those a bit further.

But I did want to make one additional note about the non-business license and permit revenue, which has been called out as a notable decreasing revenue.

that revenue is generated predominantly by CPED but also reg services and public works and those revenues are driven by development activity in the city and it's useful to monitor planning commission approvals as they can serve as a sort of lead indicator for when we'll get revenues associated with that activity.

We have seen Planning Commission approvals for larger projects, which are really a primary driver of those revenues, diminish significantly in 2023 and the start of 2024.

Accordingly, that outlook is for a substantive decline in those revenues in 2025.

That said, we are hopeful with the recent 2040 decision that that'll have a positive impact on development activity in the city and revenues.

It is something we'll continue to monitor with our partners in CPED.

So with all that said, two final slides, we can move on to unpack quickly the two largest revenue categories into the General Fund, taxes and intergovernmental revenues.

So again, taxes are the largest revenue stream into the General Fund, and property taxes account for the vast majority of that revenue.

Property taxes are roughly 55% of General Fund revenue, and nearly 90% of the General Fund tax revenue you're seeing here on this slide.

The property tax revenue forecast follows the five-year financial direction as documented in the 2024 Council-adopted budget.

So that is a 6.1% levy increase in 2025 and 5.7% in 2026.

The 2025 planned levy accounts for no new spending or decision-making, which may take place through the rest of the budget process.

One additional note about a very small peach local sales tax box you might see at the bottom of 2024 column.

That is $6.2 million, which was forecasted last year for the state's newly established local affordable housing aid, which is supported by a sales tax.

This revenue is not reflected in the general fund tax revenue beginning in 2025 because after further internal discussion and consultation it was determined that the revenue should be received into a special revenue fund given the restrictions around use and furthermore that the revenue should be not categorized as a tax but rather as a state aid because the distribution of the revenue is based off of a formula or methodology established by the state.

and one final revenue slide.

Intergovernmental revenues again are the second largest revenue stream into the general fund and local government aid or LGA accounts for the majority of that revenue.

LGA is roughly 12% of general fund revenue and nearly 80% of these general fund intergovernmental revenues you see on the screen.

2025 LGA is forecasted to hold flat from 2024.

And on the screen here, you will note a large drop off in 2025.

That is because of the roughly $19 million in public safety aid was received in 2023.

That's the dark blue box you see.

And was budgeted in 2024.

And that's the light blue you see in 2024.

And with that, I will pass it back to Justin to bring expenses and revenues together.

Council Vice President Chug Thai, members of the committee.

So to put this all together, we started today looking at different expense trends, namely personnel and internal service charges, and touched on the base budget and how we generally keep those costs flat at the department level.

After the expense side of the discussion, Ben talked us through some top revenue categories in terms of share to the total revenue budget.

And now on this slide, looking at revenues and expenditures together, we see we're not coming in balanced.

This view is inclusive of plan transfers out as well as transfers in and temporary use of cash that were adopted with the current year's financial plan.

This chart shows two prior years of actuals, the 24 adopted and then the plan for 2025 through 2030.

This is prior to any new spending decisions.

We're currently looking at a $21.6 million gap between revenues and expenditures.

and that's for 2025 and increasing that to $38 million in 2026, the supplemental year.

The General Fund is the part of the city's budgets where the administration and policy makers spend a significant amount of time in decision making and it is the most flexible portion of the budget with little to no restrictions on how to use the revenues received.

While we had influxes of resources in prior years due to federal and state dollars, there is nothing significant enough in the near term that we can use to fill that gap.

As has been mentioned, while 22 and 23 saw an early recovery of our revenues from the pandemic, this trend is normalizing while expenses are climbing, particularly within the cost of hiring and retaining our workforce.

This is not something that is unique to the City of Minneapolis, with peer cities projecting budget gaps in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The objective of our office will now be to look at all possible levers within our collective control to maximize revenues and prioritize spending using our city goals as a guide.

Where in prior years' CSL presentations this picture was close to balancing and the subsequent months saw discussions around new spending capacity, this year we will be discussing on how best to close the gap and reach a balanced budget by December.

I'll now wrap up with a brief timeline of what's to come as we approach December.

So we are here today presenting the current service level as an estimate of 2025 revenues and expenditures.

For June and July, departments will begin to present their budgets to the mayor, and the recommended budget will begin to get finalized.

In August, the mayor will release the recommended budget for 2025-26, and then the budget division will return in September with an overview of that recommended budget.

Immediately following that, the BET will review that budget, hold a public hearing, and then set the maximum levy.

And the Budget Committee will then begin receiving department presentations through the months of October and November.

This is also when we'll have our public hearings on the budget.

Thank you Chair Chugchai and thank you Director DeCensa and your team for such a thorough presentation and I know I'm going to have to watch this on YouTube at like half time speed later to make sure I caught everything but it's very thorough so I really appreciate that.

I'm wondering if we could just go back to the local government aid or general fund intergovernmental aid revenues slide and just wanting to

make sure that I'm understanding correctly that all grants are considered local government aid or

Through the chair council member, the local government aid is a very specific form of aid that we get from the state of Minnesota.

It's part of a long-standing state tradition, the Minnesota Miracle, where a lot of revenues are collected at the state level and then dispersed throughout the state.

We worked with our IGR team to develop this forecast.

With more detail?

Through the Chair, Councilmember, no.

Grants are in separate funds, so LGA is a specific general fund source.

We budget our grant funds in funds 1300, 1400, and 1600, and this is fund 100.

Through the Chair, Councilmember Cashman, absolutely the grants are, especially for those departments, a really important component of their budgets.

The budget books, which, you know, were the most recent one was from December, do show the breakdown between general fund and those grant funds.

We can work to make sure that that information is also available to you in the fall.

Thank you.

Next we have Councilmember Wonsley.

I just wanted to make sure I heard correctly the gap or deficit if those numbers could be restated again for 2025 and 2026.

Through the Chair, Councilmember Wansley, those figures were $21.6 million in 2025 and $38 million in 2026.

and then can you also share a little bit in terms of it's clear most of our revenue is coming through property taxes and that's correlating with the increases that we've now moved forward with since last year with six percent six percent this year so again over twelve percent it seems like over the next three years.

Through the Chair, Councilmember Wonsley, 12% is scary enough, but consider that when you're adding percentages, you have a new starting point every year.

So it's 6% based off of that adjusted figure annually.

Wait, just clarification.

But we have a new starting point every year.

And so it's an additional 6% off of that new starting point.

So it's not cumulative?

It is cumulative percent increases compound, right?

Like if you have interest in your bank account, it compounds.

So it's compounded instead of cumulative.

Okay, I just want to note that in terms of I know my constituents speaks of it from a cumulative standpoint of they're seeing increases in their bills and they want to know why.

And not only are constituents seeing that, they're seeing particularly a burden being shifted onto them as opposed to some of the more substantial businesses.

So I think that's the dynamic that we're trying to reconcile of where the burden is being placed and shifted to.

May I?

Through the chair, council member, I completely agree and it's something that we in finance are very attentive to because we also want people to be able to live in the city of Minneapolis.

You saw from the assessing department a great presentation on that burden shift from commercial to residential.

All the comments I had are kind of scary stuff, but yeah.

Yep, thank you council member.

Thank you Vice President Chag Thai.

I was curious what kind of discussions have been happening or if you have any visibility into discussions around LGA and the formula around that and specifically around this trend of folks working remotely and

We clearly have some significant impacts on property taxes and the valuations of downtown buildings However, all of those workers that were being productive in those office towers downtown are now being productive in a home office somewhere

The value that they're creating for these companies and the cost savings of not having to pay for a lease downtown is not getting translated to wages.

It appears that it's just going to the bottom line of these corporations.

So I'm curious if there's any larger structural conversation around what a tax regime looks like at the state level and then how that could translate to LGA as a means of

Through the chair council president, I think it's an excellent question and something I think I would defer to Katie Topinka and IGR Who's certainly more plugged into those conversations?

I know we were surprised during COVID about the about the far-reaching impacts of work from home We didn't think about what it would mean for enterprise funds people using sinks at work Has an impact on how much revenue we're taking in as a city.

Wonderful.

Seeing no further discussion, I'll ask the Clerk to file that report.

And our final item for today is receiving a report from Mayor Frey on his 2025-2026 city goals and priorities and budget priorities.

Mayor Frey, thank you for joining us here today.

Thank you Madam Chair and Council Members for your due diligence and your work around this budget and also around the work of just making sure that we're guiding the purse strings of this city.

Obviously our budget lead in Jane DeCenza has got a lot of really good information.

I'm glad you've been able to hear directly from her.

So two weeks ago, I delivered my annual State of the City address and that the remarks I articulated in the address are consistent with the promises and the goals that I've maintained throughout my time as mayor.

The priorities that I shared with you largely have not changed, but they are very important in helping to direct our city resources, guide staff time, and then inform future budget decisions.

My priorities also support our work adopted in the City's Strategic and Race Equity Action Plan.

As a reminder, the priorities are affordable housing and homelessness, that's one, economic inclusion and recovery, that's the second, safety

and also there have been two newer priorities that were previously embedded in the other three but we've decided to kind of lift them up and those are our climate action work as well as good governance which came along with the new government restructure.

So those are the five priorities that largely inform the work that we do at the administration just because there is not a priority listed in there.

It could mean that it just didn't make the list.

It could also mean that it's actually embedded in one of those five.

But we do need a short list of those high-level priorities in order to get the important work done as the city, as you know, when you don't prioritize then everything is a priority and you don't end up getting things done.

and delivering on our priorities is happening and I'll just share a few examples that some of which I highlighted during the State of the City address and by no means is this a complete list of that work.

The first is affordable housing and homelessness.

Thanks to the work of both our administration as well as the City Council, we're continuing our nation leading work including over $360 million invested since 2018.

That's specifically in affordable housing.

That work has remained guided by four pillars.

Those four pillars in affordable housing are production.

That's production of affordable housing with a focus on deeply affordable.

That's home ownership with a focus on reducing racial asperities between white people and black people.

That's renters rights.

And then finally it's homelessness response and partnership with Hennepin County.

which is the operator of the countywide shelter system and runs a lot of the social service work as well.

Beyond that, as you know, we also do a whole lot of work in the area of naturally occurring affordable housing, recognizing that it's about three times cheaper to retain an already existing naturally affordable housing development than it is to build fresh.

And since 2018,

you I'm sure you know we're producing affordable housing units overall at a rate of about two and a half times the rate of the previous six years and the work around prioritizing deeply affordable housing that's housing at 30% of the area median median income and under that's presently happening at eight and a half times the previous rate so two and a half times for affordable housing overall

eight and a half times the previous rate for deeply affordable housing.

Thank you for your collaboration on those really important investments.

Also note something that just happened last night, which is a huge deal for our city.

You're all familiar with the comprehensive plan and the subsequent litigation that we have gone through.

The legislature's excellent efforts have now

enabled us to continue on with that 2040 plan which allows for us to have a diversity of housing options and therefore a diversity of people in every neighborhood

People often ask how you get affordable housing in middle and upper income neighborhoods.

Well, the first key is to allow for it.

While technically speaking we did allow for it, practically speaking we didn't.

Because unless you're able to build a big home on a big parcel, it's very difficult to get affordable housing in huge swaths of the city.

So that is a really big piece that I know so many up here

on the dais and staff worked extensively on and thank you to the legislators that helped get that done.

Next is climate action.

As you all know, we together created the Climate Legacy Initiative, funded it with $10 million, and we're setting a standard truly that other cities can follow.

This was an area of great collaboration and consensus, and one of the big areas that we want to focus on for use of that $10 million is weatherization.

working with our labor and union partners and making sure that we can go into a neighborhood and almost have a situation where we're opting out instead of opting into getting these improvements done.

Of course that neighborhood should be focused in a green zone with a cross-section of both poverty and pollution.

Obviously that's not all we're doing on climate action but in the interest of moving on to the next topic, economic inclusion and recovery.

We elevated our arts work to be an entire department.

You all were part of that.

and they're setting out on a path to convert vacant storefronts into usable and vibrant spaces and also support arts and cultural activities in our cultural districts.

We have invested $11 million in the ownership and opportunity fund since its inception in 2019.

You all are very well familiar how much that has helped.

It's helping 22 business owners become property owners.

This includes work.

on both the north side and the south side.

As part of Doors Open, by the way, I headed over to the Coliseum this weekend.

I believe in Councilmember Chavez's ward.

It's beautiful, as you can attest, Councilmember.

Really an incredible project and thank you so much, Councilmembers, for your collaboration on it.

We're investing in infrastructure in our community also at George Floyd Square.

We purchased the People's Way.

A whole lot of work needs to be done.

towards getting it into both a physical shape but also doing the engagement necessary to dictate that site's future.

Having site control over it allows us to do that, working directly with community to chart a clear path as to where that intersection and where that particular parcel can go.

The topic of community safety and police reform.

We're moving along on our plans to open the Southside Community Safety Center this next year.

And thank you council members for all of your work and engagement on it.

We're implementing recommendations coming out of the Minneapolis Safe and Thriving Communities report to continue building out

an ecosystem that includes safety services addressing prevention, response and then ultimately restoration and this will build on our existing safety beyond policing initiatives and the violence prevention work something I know that we're all very much in support of and you know we continue to do the work on police reform our police department both through the settlement agreement and then the eventual consent decree

It helps us have a clear target as to what we need to hit.

It helps make so that everybody has a keen understanding of what we need to get done and it's all about working together to strive towards getting there.

One of the big elements that you will find in a settlement agreement but we will also, I imagine, find

in the consent decree is the implementation of an early intervention system.

This is something that we've been working on for years, helps to bring all of the data that we receive in a number of different locations better, and importantly, helps us to assess out problematic conduct or behavior or mentality before it becomes a real problem.

This is not

just about disciplining officers.

This is about making sure that officers have the right tools and they get the right support so they are their best versions of self so that their well-being is taken care of and that we've got the right supervisory.

pieces in place to make sure that when an issue is identified, we're able to quickly deal with it.

And then finally, good governance.

We're investing directly into our city workforce and seeing great results on new applications and hiring data, much of which I highlighted during the State of the City.

We're recruiting first responders to fill some of these hard-to-fill roles, and we're making some great progress, especially in the 911 department.

This is an area where we previously had quite a bit of attrition and there were quite a few vacancies and our hope is by this summer

or even early summer, those vacancies will all be filled.

It's really good progress around filling these key positions, which of course are our first responders of the first responders.

And all of these priorities and goals that were outlined in the State of the City are implemented in a variety of different ways, but in large part through the budget.

The budget that I propose, that you all work on,

budget is going to look very different this year.

I have often said around this time during the budget cycle that we were going to have a tough year and then some influx of money that we weren't anticipating comes in to make it less so.

This year it looks like it will be that hard.

We will have difficult decisions to make, and I won't repeat everything that I said during the State of the City, but the reality is that things will look different.

This is not the year to add new programs.

This is the year to make sure that we're using our money as efficiently as possible, recognizing where perhaps old or archaic programs aren't working as well, being innovative as possible, where if there are new programs or

or recently added programs that can be adjusted and we need to effectively carry out the programs that we do have that are functioning at a high level.

Here are a few areas where we know that we're going to have to invest this year, areas that are largely not optional.

First is our workforce.

We believe in our staff at the city.

It's one of my favorite parts about working here.

They need to get paid.

and there has been significant market adjustment taking place around working in the public service.

These are hard jobs and these are jobs that we need in the city and we're looking at the renewal around 12 plus union contracts that will certainly come with increases in wages, in some cases significant increases in wages and those increases will be reflected in a budget levy.

Police Reform.

We already know we're working on a settlement agreement.

We anticipate a federal consent decree coming soon as well.

These are also costs that will be added in some form to that levy.

And again, these are costs that are largely not optional, but we all know that we need to do and will be part of that increase as well.

The kicker, as you know, is downtown valuation.

We know our tax base will have to shift and we don't want the burden to fall too much on our residents.

It would be a different scenario if we had a progressive tax system in place.

The tax system that is presently available

is a regressive one.

It disproportionately impacts low-income people and seniors.

I'd be happy to work with all of you on finding solutions to that overall dynamic.

I think there's room for quite a bit of collaboration there.

In the immediacy, however, we're dealing with the system we've got, which is property taxes.

and the money's got to ultimately come from somewhere and so the burden of that regressive shift it goes to our residents.

So I'll repeat this is not the year for

New programs or new items, it's perhaps a year to recalibrate where old existing ones aren't working as well as we want them to and to improve them.

It's a year for effectively running the programs that we have.

And we can continue doing that great work of our enterprise.

And so I have meetings that are set up, I believe, with all the council members in the next couple of weeks, one to two to three weeks here.

And so I want to have an opportunity to sit down with all of you

to get the specific budget priorities that you have.

And I very much look forward to those conversations.

I can tell you that feedback can be

So I know we're all going to be working together for the remainder of the year to craft this budget.

There is still a ton of work to do on our administrative side to figure out where that budget is, where the levy lands, what kind of financial resources we have incoming, and what are our costs outgoing.

You've got an overarching rundown from Jane, but a whole lot of the more specifics still need to come.

and so I look forward to working with the council members.

I look forward to getting your feedback, to your input and also keeping those property taxes as low as we possibly can, recognizing the issues that are presently taking place.

Thank you very much, Mayor Frey, for joining us, for sharing that presentation.

And I will note, there's a Planning Commission meeting happening here in ten minutes and we need to leave our clerks with just enough time to reset the room and be ready for that.

So we will not be able to have substantive discussion or questions from the committee today.

I will ask the clerk to file that report from Mayor Frey and with that we have concluded all business to come before this committee today.

Thank you for all of your patience and for paying attention through all six of those discussion items.