Budget Committee September 09, 2024   9/9/2024

Discussion

• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 00:00:21
    Good morning.
  • 00:00:23
    My name is Aisha Chugtai and I am the chair of the Budget Committee.
  • 00:00:26
    I'm going to call to order our adjourned meeting for Monday, September 9th, 2020-2024.
  • 00:00:32
    Before we begin the meeting, I want to offer a friendly reminder to all members, staff, and the public that these meetings are broadcast live to enable greater public participation.
  • 00:00:44
    These broadcasts include real-time captioning as a further method to increase the accessibility of our proceedings to the community.
  • 00:00:51
    Therefore all speakers need to be mindful of the rate of their speech so that our captioners can fully capture and transcribe all comments for the broadcast.
  • 00:00:59
    We ask all speakers to moderate the speed and clarity of their comments and at this time I'll ask the clerk to call the roll so we can verify the presence of a quorum.
• • SPEAKER_14
  • 00:01:08
    Council Member Payne?
  • 00:01:09
    Present.
  • 00:01:10
    Wonsley?
  • 00:01:11
    Present.
  • 00:01:12
    Rainville is absent.
  • 00:01:14
    Vita?
  • 00:01:15
    Present.
  • 00:01:16
    Ellison is absent.
  • 00:01:18
    Osman is absent.
  • 00:01:20
    Cashman?
• • Aurin Chowdhury
  • 00:01:21
    Present.
• • SPEAKER_14
  • 00:01:22
    Jenkins is absent.
  • 00:01:24
    Chavez?
  • 00:01:24
    Present.
  • 00:01:25
    Chaudhry?
• • Emily Koski
  • 00:01:26
    Present.
• • SPEAKER_14
  • 00:01:27
    Palmisano?
  • 00:01:28
    Present.
  • 00:01:28
    Vice Chair Koski?
  • 00:01:29
    Present.
  • 00:01:30
    Chair Chigtai?
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 00:01:31
    Present.
• • SPEAKER_14
  • 00:01:32
    There are nine members present.
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 00:01:33
    Let the record reflect that we have a quorum.
  • 00:01:35
    I'll also remind my colleagues that we are using speaker management today or a combination of speaker management and flags.
  • 00:01:41
    If I don't capture your attention, please find the person closest to you so we can make sure that you are recognized in queue.
  • 00:01:54
    Colleagues, today begins the Budget Committee's work on the 2025 city budget.
  • 00:02:00
    That's very exciting.
  • 00:02:02
    We are going to begin with an overview of the 2025 budget and for that I will invite our budget director Jane DeCenza to get us started.
  • 00:02:10
    Welcome.
• • Jayne Discenza
  • 00:02:12
    Good morning, everyone.
  • 00:02:13
    I appreciate the enthusiasm council vice president Chuck time members of the Budget Committee happy to be here Jane descends a budget director part of the finance and property services Department and as previewed I'm giving an overview of the 25-26 Recommended budget so that we can get started on our two months of budget sessions with departments.
  • 00:02:33
    I
  • 00:02:36
    So walking through the agenda, we're going to go over a bit about the budget books just so that we're all oriented and understand where to find the important parts, how to parse all the information that's in there.
  • 00:02:46
    We'll talk about the budget process and timeline where we're at in that calendar.
  • 00:02:51
    And we'll get into some specifics about the accomplishments and challenges that are the context of the city budget We'll talk about city spending and revenue changes including the property taxes And then we'll walk through a transparency portal example just for the benefit of the public And then just briefly touch on next steps
  • 00:03:14
    So the budget book for 2526 is that online interactive version.
  • 00:03:20
    You'll notice compared to previous years, it's got much better navigation, better accessibility, as well as some built in language translation.
  • 00:03:27
    So we hope that that's helpful for for anyone who's
  • 00:03:31
    trying to access the budget.
  • 00:03:33
    The whole benefit of this online format is the transparency piece.
  • 00:03:37
    So we are linking all of those reports and tables to our financial transparency site.
  • 00:03:42
    So anyone who is looking through the budget can click through, refine the filters, and investigate whatever questions that they might have about the budget.
  • 00:03:52
    We have continued to refine the budget summary section so that we're trying to get at those key questions that often come up when we're talking with all of you and the press and the public.
  • 00:04:01
    So we hope the budget summary is helpful to all of you.
  • 00:04:05
    There will be a PDF version of the online publication in mid-September.
  • 00:04:11
    We'll have that linked in LIMS just for posterity, but of course we love the online version.
  • 00:04:17
    And then finally just a shout out to all the departments that contribute.
  • 00:04:21
    It is a massive lift to get together a publication like this and they're working on it from the beginning of the year.
  • 00:04:27
    The budget team of course is working really hard in the last couple weeks of July and August to get that done.
  • 00:04:33
    And so thanks to everybody who worked on it.
  • 00:04:39
    So the budget book sections that people might be the most interested in starting with the budget summary I would encourage everyone to review if you haven't already the budget in brief which is really just kind of budget 101 and then there are also more detailed city spending and revenue pages as well as a new spending by priority page which is a great place to start if you're wondering you know what is the mayor proposing for housing and homelessness work next year that can be a great place to dive in.
  • 00:05:07
    In the financial policy section, you'll see that we consolidated all of those stories into one, so that's a little bit easier to navigate.
  • 00:05:14
    There are no substantive changes proposed here.
  • 00:05:16
    We are still in that year-long review process that has been greatly aided by our visiting scholar slash intern, Enos Mustafa, who's with us, and we've been working closely with the city attorney's office as well to make sure that we're flagging any needed changes in financial policies.
  • 00:05:33
    Those are of course meant to keep all of our accounting and financial systems working accurately and in alignment with industry standards.
  • 00:05:42
    And we do anticipate we'll be back in January with any proposed changes per the work plan.
  • 00:05:48
    In the department section, you're going to see the most detailed view of each department's finances as well as discussion around all of their core functions and any proposed changes.
  • 00:05:57
    There are racial equity and performance metrics discussed on those pages and I also want to say thank you to REIB and PMI for being great partners this year.
  • 00:06:06
    We're trying to work together much more intentionally and sort of reinforce all of our functions and that's been a really great effort so far.
  • 00:06:14
    There are also discussions of any staffing changes or internal transfers on those department pages and the team has also added a staffing report for greater transparency this year.
  • 00:06:26
    In the capital section, you'll see an outline of the city and the park board capital infrastructure plans, the capital improvement plan.
  • 00:06:36
    If you have questions about maybe a paving project in your ward or a park renovation, that's the place that you're going to want to look.
  • 00:06:43
    And if you're interested in tracing the capital process from the beginning, there are a lot of resources on the finance website, so all the original capital budget requests from departments are linked.
  • 00:06:53
    The click report is another stop along the way, and then that click report then informs the mayor's budget.
  • 00:07:00
    We did add brief descriptions of each project this year just to improve readability and navigability for users.
  • 00:07:08
    And then finally, the financial schedules are that technical piece of the budget, what you all get to vote on in December.
  • 00:07:14
    And these are the summaries of the transfers, the revenues, expenditures, staffing tables, and the CDBG program.
  • 00:07:23
    Most of the budget book is seeking to explain those schedules.
  • 00:07:33
    So when we were last in front of you, we were talking about the current service level budget.
  • 00:07:36
    So I just wanted to bring back that timeline to sort of illustrate where we're at in the process and what's come before.
  • 00:07:42
    So in May, we talked about how the CSL is built on that prior year adopted budget.
  • 00:07:49
    And there's a lot of steps along the way to get us to that May presentation of the estimates for the new costs of those commitments that we made in the prior year.
  • 00:07:57
    So the steps along the way, we do that budget kickoff for all departments so that everybody's on the same page.
  • 00:08:03
    We do a reconciliation of personnel, so we look at HR's personnel data, what we have in our budget system, and what departments think ought to be in their personnel budgets, and we reconcile all of that and make sure we understand any variances.
  • 00:08:18
    We pull out any one-time spending, we revisit the charges for internal services, and we do a robust revenue forecast.
  • 00:08:28
    This is also the time where we're asking departments to look at those base budgets and see if they need to make any budget neutral changes.
  • 00:08:34
    So if you were looking at a department budget by category, you might see changes in the category.
  • 00:08:40
    At that point, it might be important to zoom out and look at the budget overall so that you can see, okay, is this growing the budget?
  • 00:08:46
    Are we decreasing the budget?
  • 00:08:47
    Or are we just shifting categories?
  • 00:08:52
    So we present, of course, the current service level in May, and then there are perhaps some minor changes from that point on, but the data is largely locked.
  • 00:09:02
    An example of a change that happens after the CSL presentation is local government aid.
  • 00:09:08
    That gets certified later in the summer.
  • 00:09:09
    We were able to revise that upward very slightly after we present it to you all in May.
  • 00:09:16
    So really all of this timeline that gets us to the mayor's recommended budget all of that CSL work is our team trying to do our due diligence on all those granular inputs that we can explain variances to you all as you have questions and then by the time we get to the August budget release we have all of that CSL work plus the new spending proposals along with the strategy for balancing the budget.
  • 00:09:41
    So what's the revenue that is paying for all of those things?
  • 00:09:47
    Moving on to some more specifics about this particular budget cycle and the context that we're in.
  • 00:09:53
    So this is our second time with a biennial budget process.
  • 00:09:58
    And as a city, I think we're all trying to get better at long range strategic thinking and a biennial budget, a two year structure is a great way for us to do that.
  • 00:10:06
    So if you think about a department Perhaps proposing a new FTE to start in 2026 that gives them a full year to write a job description Recruit and go through the hiring process and be ready to hit the ground running on January 1st So that year of pre-planning can be really helpful as we're trying to be more thoughtful about our resources as a city.
  • 00:10:28
    Sales tax revenues have surpassed our pre-pandemic levels.
  • 00:10:32
    So you all will recall, prior to the pandemic, we were at about $92 million in gross revenues for local sales taxes that bottomed out at about $51 million.
  • 00:10:44
    And we hit in 2023, we had $100 million in gross revenues.
  • 00:10:48
    So we are projecting fairly modest growth into 25 and 26 of about three and a half percent for gross revenue.
  • 00:10:56
    We launched a new process this year called the Technology Improvement Plan, which you will get a separate presentation on later from Finance and IT.
  • 00:11:05
    But the idea here is to mirror the Capital Improvement Plan and think holistically about those enterprise-wide technology infrastructure needs so that we're pulling those aside from perhaps a more political process and thinking holistically about what is the enterprise need for cybersecurity for an ERP system and the like.
  • 00:11:26
    We were able to expand the capital improvement plan this year.
  • 00:11:30
    So you'll get, again, a full presentation on that.
  • 00:11:33
    But I just pulled out one year as an example.
  • 00:11:35
    So in last year's budget, the recommendation for spending in 2025 was $258.4 million.
  • 00:11:42
    in the mayor's recommended budget, that capital plan for 2025 goes up to 279.
  • 00:11:48
    And we're able to do that because in part, you know, we have that AAA bond rating, which means we can do more with our existing resources.
  • 00:11:55
    So we kept the the debt service levy as, as was adopted in the prior plan, we're able to do more with that.
  • 00:12:04
    doing all the basics that we need to do like paving roads and fixing bridges and also meeting those new settlement agreement requirements that will be discussed in the next presentation.
  • 00:12:15
    And then finally, on our team, we piloted a public engagement program, which is something we've been wanting to do, I think, since 2019.
  • 00:12:23
    And we're really excited that we were able to have a series of small sort of intentional conversations.
  • 00:12:28
    We worked really closely with IT and NCR to make sure we're designing a program that was helpful to people we were engaging, and also met our goals of bringing the budget process to people who are not necessarily as connected with it.
  • 00:12:43
    So we had five cultural community groups that we engaged with and also appreciate all of those folks for coming out often at night or on the weekend.
  • 00:12:53
    We hope to continue building those relationships in future years.
  • 00:13:01
    So some challenges.
  • 00:13:02
    Of course, I think we all know that the story of this budget was really that our expenses were growing faster than our revenue.
  • 00:13:09
    So we had a gap at the beginning of the summer that we were seeking to address.
  • 00:13:13
    And a lot of that is due to personnel costs.
  • 00:13:16
    As a government, we're transparent about those labor costs increasing.
  • 00:13:19
    And of course, we want excellent staff.
  • 00:13:22
    We want to be able to recruit and retain people who can do the hard work that governing requires.
  • 00:13:27
    So it may be a benefit to the city and also it does cost money and so that is a factor in this budget The settlement agreement is another requirement that we're eager to fulfill and it also Leads to increased expenditures in many cases.
  • 00:13:42
    So there are settlement agreement expenses in the capital and the operating side this year and we need personnel who are able to fulfill those requirements
  • 00:13:52
    Another factor in this year's budget was the declining property values that you heard from the assessor about and that does lead to this burden shift from commercial properties to residential properties.
  • 00:14:03
    So in plain language, that just means that the city's residents are going to feel the property tax increase more acutely than they may have in prior years and that is just a factor for decision makers to be aware of.
  • 00:14:17
    While we're seeing some growth in local sales taxes, which is excellent, we're seeing overall only modest growth on the revenue side.
  • 00:14:24
    And that's because those increases in sales taxes are balanced by some declines in other areas.
  • 00:14:31
    So construction-related activity is down this year.
  • 00:14:34
    We do hope that the 2014
  • 00:14:36
    decision.
  • 00:14:37
    Maybe we'll change that course and we'll of course revisit things in 2026 if that winds up to be true.
  • 00:14:43
    And then finally, we've long been planning for the end of ARPA funding.
  • 00:14:47
    It is a reality.
  • 00:14:49
    We are not going to see additional ARPA funding in 2025.
  • 00:14:58
    So closing the gap in the general fund.
  • 00:15:00
    So when we came to you for the CSL presentation, we mentioned this gap between our expenses and revenues.
  • 00:15:06
    And so I wanted to circle back and talk about how we handled that over the summer.
  • 00:15:10
    So there were a couple strategies that addressed that for us.
  • 00:15:15
    So first of all, we took a look at all the existing expenses.
  • 00:15:20
    Transfers are something that can be sort of behind this behind the scenes But we took a look at all of those things we noted some large transfers going from cap going from the general fund to support the capital program
  • 00:15:32
    We were able to reduce that amount without harming the overall CIP.
  • 00:15:36
    Again, due to leveraging our existing capacity on the debt side.
  • 00:15:42
    So that was one major strategy for closing the gap.
  • 00:15:45
    We additionally pivoted another transfer, which had been supporting downtown assets.
  • 00:15:50
    The parking fund transferred to downtown assets.
  • 00:15:52
    We shifted that over to transfer to the general fund.
  • 00:15:56
    We also work to better understand the scale of economic development work in the city so that we could increase the downtown assets fund transfer.
  • 00:16:04
    As you all know, those local sales taxes are meant to support our city's downtown assets like the convention center, like PV Plaza, and also to foster economic development.
  • 00:16:13
    And so we maximize that transfer increasing it from what was planned to be 32 million up to 43.7 million.
  • 00:16:22
    And then the final levers which we'll get into in the next couple slides were the increased use of cash, so utilizing our, you know, accumulated fund balance as well as some uncommitted PSA, public safety dollars.
  • 00:16:34
    And then finally, the property tax levy is sort of the last lever for addressing the gap.
  • 00:16:40
    I did also want to note that departments were asked wherever possible to reallocate their existing dollars to make sure they're maximizing what they already have.
  • 00:16:48
    And while that doesn't solve the problem of expenses and revenue gap, it is something that they'll be able to talk to you about when they come present to you for their individual department presentations.
  • 00:17:05
    Okay, so the use of cash in this budget we had originally planned and in last year's adopted budget We had called for fourteen point two million dollars of accumulated general fund balance to be used in the 2025 budget So that is still the case this budget also uses four and a half million of the public safety aid remainder of
  • 00:17:25
    appropriation of public safety aid which has been housed in Finance and Property Services this year to provide some limited one-time relief to the property tax levy.
  • 00:17:37
    This slide also listed some examples of one-time uses, so ideally uses of cash are meant to support one-time efforts, so elections is a great example of a one-time expense.
  • 00:17:50
    It's recurring, but it's different every year if it's a presidential election year, a gubernatorial, so that's an example of something that we revisit annually to make sure we're budgeting the correct amount.
  • 00:18:02
    and then to make sure that we're budgeting sustainably in future years we've removed any use of cash from 2027 and beyond so we budgeted some use of fund balance in 25 and 26 but nothing in 27 and beyond so that will be a lever for future policymakers to consider at that time.
  • 00:18:28
    Okay, this slide has a lot of information and I'm going to take some time and walk through the different lines just so we're all on the same page.
  • 00:18:34
    So this is the the levy table.
  • 00:18:38
    So you can see the 2024 adopted levy amounts and going through 2030 2025 is in the orange box.
  • 00:18:46
    So you'll see in the bolded line the total property tax amount So this budget calls for an eight point one percent increase the property tax levy So when we say eight point one percent, that is the percent change from the prior year So going through the lines from the top to the bottom the general fund levy Of course is what we spend the most time talking about.
  • 00:19:07
    It's the most flexible use of funds and that shows a ten point one percent increase from prior year and
  • 00:19:14
    Next is the park board levy amount.
  • 00:19:17
    So there are a series of conversations usually with the park board and the mayor's team as well as finance in the summer to understand what the park board's needs are.
  • 00:19:26
    The mayor's recommended a 7% increase for the levy for the park board, which would bring them to $88.4 million.
  • 00:19:33
    The park board will be in front of you all to discuss the details of their proposed budget.
  • 00:19:40
    The bond redemption line is how we pay for a lot of the capital programs.
  • 00:19:45
    So this is kind of our debt service line.
  • 00:19:48
    There is an increase from the prior year, but it is in alignment with the plan.
  • 00:19:52
    So there's no changes to the debt service line from last year.
  • 00:19:58
    The permanent improvement levy is how we're funding that technology improvement plan that I mentioned earlier.
  • 00:20:03
    So this has been a long-standing levy, and we're sort of routing it for a more specific purpose this year.
  • 00:20:09
    And you'll see that it's a decrease there of 22%.
  • 00:20:13
    That was done in order to aid the bottom line of the levy.
  • 00:20:19
    The next two lines, pensions and teachers' retirement, are static throughout.
  • 00:20:24
    So these are some retirement programs.
  • 00:20:28
    The teachers wanted sort of a legacy program.
  • 00:20:31
    So we levy what's needed, keeping an eye on the fund balance, making sure we can meet our obligations there.
  • 00:20:37
    Municipal Building Commission has a levy, which is decreasing, proposed to decrease to $4.6 million, so that will require them to use some of their fund balance.
  • 00:20:48
    The BET has proposed a slight decrease as well, and they had some fund balance so that they can sustain their operations.
  • 00:20:57
    And then finally, the Public Housing Authority, so that was that newly reinstated HRA levy last year, is held flat at $5 million across all the years.
  • 00:21:05
    and of course the BET will be meeting soon to decide on the maximum property tax levy which we have to certify to the county by the end of the month.
  • 00:21:20
    Moving on to some more spending specifics.
  • 00:21:23
    So this is a $1.88 billion budget in 25, increasing to $1.9 billion in 2026.
  • 00:21:32
    So as a percent change from 2024, that's about 2.86% increase.
  • 00:21:39
    Given that the story of this budget is really around personnel costs I just wanted to flag that this budget includes the police federation increase as well as the laborers contract increase We do know that there are a lot of open contracts in next year for many bargaining units and so where possible we include the actual contract terms and where those open contracts we work closely with labor relations to understand
  • 00:22:07
    what the context is, what might be some reasonable assumptions there.
  • 00:22:17
    Alright, so on the spending side, I also wanted to bring us back to December of 2023, which feels like a really long time ago, and just flag that there were some pre-commitments made at that time during budget negotiations to add some positions to the general fund in 2025.
  • 00:22:33
    So these are shown on each department's budget book page, but they're labeled a little differently So just wanted to call that out.
  • 00:22:39
    They're shown as 2025-26 pre-commitments And they have the full narrative so that you can understand what those are meant for but this impacts the office of community safety the police department and
  • 00:22:50
    and Performance Management and Innovation.
  • 00:22:54
    Most of these positions are filled at this point.
  • 00:22:56
    The idea was that these departments would use public safety aid as a bridge to 2025 and then the general fund would kick in for those positions.
  • 00:23:06
    So I'll certainly let departments present on specifics of that but just wanted to flag it since it is last year that we have those discussions.
  • 00:23:19
    A little bit more on public safety aid here.
  • 00:23:20
    So of course, we received as a city that $19 million one time.
  • 00:23:24
    It was appropriated in the 24 budget.
  • 00:23:26
    There have been some changes since then.
  • 00:23:28
    And this budget largely leaves all those changes in place with a couple of key exceptions.
  • 00:23:33
    So I wanted to make sure we talk about those.
  • 00:23:37
    So the PSA remainder amount, the amount that was sitting in finance, is about $4.5 million there.
  • 00:23:43
    So that is going to be used on a one-time basis to limit that impact on the levy.
  • 00:23:48
    and then there was an additional amount that is recommended for community safety personnel background checks so there's an expanded background check for positions like sworn officers in the police department and the city is planning to use an external vendor to help expedite some of those things that we can move through the hiring process and not lose candidates and so
  • 00:24:13
    Some of the public safety dollars that were unlikely to be spent this year are being proposed to be routed to that in OCS and civil rights.
  • 00:24:22
    And that leaves the remainder, so the amount of public safety aid that's being rerouted is sort of being backfilled by general fund for REIBs so that they have a little bit more flexibility in the kind of work they can do with those dollars since public safety aid funding from the state requires that really clear nexus to those community safety programs.
  • 00:24:46
    On the new spending side, so we have that new spending by priority section where you can see everything broken down by priorities and by fund.
  • 00:24:56
    So the majority of the new general fund spending is within good governance and economic inclusion priority areas.
  • 00:25:02
    There is about $29.5 million in recommended new spending in 2025 for all the funds.
  • 00:25:08
    19.3 million of that is in the general fund There are offsets in place for public safety aid, franchise fee revenues, that downtown assets transfer is covering the cost of a lot of the economic inclusion work So about 12.1 million dollars of that new spending is really impacting the levy
  • 00:25:27
    And there's some examples listed here.
  • 00:25:29
    So with the end of ARPA we had to make some decisions about one time about ARPA programs that were maybe expansions of existing work or new work and we needed to decide this year should that work continue or fall to the or fall away so
  • 00:25:45
    that was part of the decision process.
  • 00:25:48
    The development fund has slowly been moving on to the general fund as the development fund diminishes and so a lot of these efforts were existing people, existing programs and they're just being brought on to the general fund.
  • 00:26:01
    There's $3 million for the cost of running elections in 2025.
  • 00:26:05
    There's $1.3 million for staffing costs for the settlement agreement.
  • 00:26:09
    And then there's $1 million for unsheltered homelessness response that's meant to bring the city's operations more in line with what the county does.
  • 00:26:21
    So a lot of numbers on this slide.
  • 00:26:23
    So I won't read them all, but I think the story here is that there is some increase to the FTE count from the 24 adopted budget to this recommended budget.
  • 00:26:32
    So we're going from 4,195 FTEs in 24 to 4,270 FTEs in 25, with a few more slated to start in 26.
  • 00:26:44
    So just as a reminder, we don't include capital funded or temporary positions in our budget data.
  • 00:26:51
    But you can see all of those full-time equivalent summaries in the schedule five of the budget book as well as in that new staffing report on each department's page Departments will be prepared to speak to their changes and their budgeted FTE count as well as vacancies in their individual presentations
  • 00:27:15
    Moving on to revenue.
  • 00:27:17
    So we have 1.9 billion in revenues and 25 increasing slightly to 1.91 in the future.
  • 00:27:25
    There are multiple revenue sources that are coming into the city.
  • 00:27:30
    Charges for sales and services as well as taxes are the two largest sources.
  • 00:27:36
    What you can see on this slide still is that impact of federal relief money from COVID.
  • 00:27:42
    So that orange box, the intergovernmental revenues, shows the impact of CARES and then ARPA.
  • 00:27:48
    And you can see how it's diminishing over time.
  • 00:27:50
    So now the intergovernmental revenues section is really just the local government aid from the state.
  • 00:27:57
    So overall, you can see there's very modest growth going from 24 into 25 and 26.
  • 00:28:01
    And that's because of those fluctuations in some of those major revenue areas.
  • 00:28:13
    Moving into some more specifics on the property tax levy.
  • 00:28:16
    As we said, it's an 8.1% recommended increase in 25 and then 9.8% in 2026.
  • 00:28:23
    The levy increase dollar-wise in 25 is $36 million.
  • 00:28:31
    Property taxes are based on the property's market values.
  • 00:28:34
    So individual homeowners are not all going to uniformly see an 8.1% increase on their property tax statement.
  • 00:28:41
    It all depends on the balance between the different property types.
  • 00:28:46
    And so the assessor's team will be working to finalize all of that information.
  • 00:28:49
    throughout the fall.
  • 00:28:53
    Because of the realities of the commercial and the residential markets declining this year, a 0% increase in the levy would still result in a $36 increase in the median single-family home residential homestead in the city.
  • 00:29:09
    With this proposed levy, instead that median home will see about $207 increase in property taxes.
  • 00:29:19
    And this slide also links to the levy impact estimator that the assessing team puts together And again, that's all an estimate but on the next slide Shows a screenshot from that tool.
  • 00:29:31
    It is a really helpful way to sort of visualize the impact across the city You can shift if you want to look at residential properties or commercial or industrial You could drill into your specific wards and see what those percent changes are likely to be for your residents So this is a really great estimator to help sort of
  • 00:29:49
    elucidate the impact on the people of Minneapolis.
  • 00:29:57
    So what will those property taxes go towards?
  • 00:30:01
    So we did see about a 1.8% decline in the median home value from 23 into 2024.
  • 00:30:09
    So the median home is now $329,000.
  • 00:30:14
    Under this recommended levy, the property taxes for a home like that will be about $2,098.
  • 00:30:18
    And you can see the breakdown of where that money would go.
  • 00:30:23
    So some departments that are specifically called out here, so police, parks, the capital and debt service, those things are rising towards the top of the list there, which is pretty standard.
  • 00:30:37
    The general government service line is basically everything else in the city that's not specifically called out.
  • 00:30:42
    So the legislative department, the finance department, the attorneys, the mayor's office, that's all sort of lumped into the general government service line.
  • 00:30:50
    So tracing that over time, you can sort of see the growth in government.
  • 00:30:53
    over the last several years.
  • 00:31:00
    So we've talked a bit about sales taxes, and you got a really great presentation in May from our colleague Ben Zimmerman on this.
  • 00:31:08
    I'll just note that it has been a really great last couple of months for downtown.
  • 00:31:12
    So we saw a 45% increase in downtown activity from last year.
  • 00:31:17
    June of 2024 set a record for hotel room revenues, and that was due to things like the Timberwolves playoffs, the gymnastics trials, and then pride, Taste of Minnesota, all those great local events that we have.
  • 00:31:30
    So taxes from all that downtown activity are what sustains the downtown assets fund and allows us to transfer some dollars into the general fund So again, pretty modest growth 3.5% in gross revenues projected in this category and
  • 00:31:49
    Moving on to LGA.
  • 00:31:50
    So this is aid from the state that's distributed.
  • 00:31:53
    What you see on this slide is the total amount that Minneapolis receives.
  • 00:32:00
    So in blue, and then the part that Minneapolis gets to keep is an orange.
  • 00:32:04
    So we share our LGA award with the park board.
  • 00:32:07
    That's an ordinance that sets their percent of the total award at eleven point seven nine percent and then the MBC also gets a portion of our LGA So you can see from 2024 we had seventy one point six nine million Twenty-five what certified as seventy one point seven three and then we kept that flat for 2026 and
  • 00:32:34
    So just to touch base on a couple of newer revenue sources.
  • 00:32:37
    So last year, we talked a little bit about the we were calling it the I think metro area sales tax.
  • 00:32:44
    The state has branded this the local affordable housing aid.
  • 00:32:48
    So we just got our first payment of that a few weeks ago, we'll get two payments a year.
  • 00:32:54
    We have $6 million planned for that revenue source in 2025 and ongoing.
  • 00:32:58
    And CPED will be able to speak to this in greater detail, but we're using it to sort of bolster existing affordable housing efforts within that department.
  • 00:33:07
    And we have this set aside in a special revenue fund, so it's in its own fund for improved tracking so that we can easily report back to the state if we need to and just keep an eye on what those dollars are doing.
  • 00:33:18
    Franchise fees increased in the last year to support the climate legacy initiative And so a lot of the climate legacy initiative aside from personnel is budgeted as a one-time Effort so that we can revisit this revenue source annually understand what kind of room there is if it needs to be supplemented with general fund But the mayor's recommendation is still to continue that 10 million dollars in spending on the CLI
  • 00:33:42
    Part of the CLI is some money for us to work on pursuing Inflation Reduction Act tax credits.
  • 00:33:50
    So we did not budget any revenue for this, but we have applied for tax credits for some eligible projects, including our EVs.
  • 00:33:58
    So our EVs that were placed into service last year, we're seeking tax credits for those and hopefully we'll receive some this fall.
  • 00:34:06
    So we're continuing to try to maximize our efforts there.
  • 00:34:13
    Okay, and then, you know, for the benefit of the public and anybody else who's interested, I just wanted to take a second to illustrate how you might use the budget book and our transparency platform to answer some questions.
  • 00:34:25
    So you can navigate to our transparency site, either through each budget book page, all of those bar graphs will say, click to see more.
  • 00:34:33
    Or you can Google Minneapolis transparency, it should pop right up.
  • 00:34:38
    And once you're on that page, there are filters that are available.
  • 00:34:42
    So you can decide if you want to look at expenses or revenues, you can decide if you want to look at a specific department or even just a program within a department.
  • 00:34:51
    And you can shift the number of years that you're looking at.
  • 00:34:56
    So it can be a really interesting way to explore and maybe develop some further questions.
  • 00:35:02
    So one of the FAQs is always what are we budgeting for overtime for MPD.
  • 00:35:09
    So we pulled an example of what that might look like if you were to look that up.
  • 00:35:13
    You could go to the MPD budget book page and click through and then filter just for overtime account codes.
  • 00:35:21
    So the types of filters you'd add are shown on the bottom of the screen.
  • 00:35:25
    We'd look for expenses.
  • 00:35:26
    We'd look at the police department.
  • 00:35:28
    we'd go into the accounts expense type for salaries and wages and select overtime and then you get this lovely bar chart which you could then share with anybody you want by either just copying the URL it'll take people right to the visualization you were looking at or you can download it as an image or as a spreadsheet so we think this is an important tool for public transparency and engagement with the budget
  • 00:35:57
    So so moving on To just wrap up here So, of course the Budget Committee chair will be in charge of instructions for budget markup and amendments coming up What our role and the budget team is during this time is to help all of you navigate your options So we serve as a bit of an information hub if you have questions about you know department spending maybe you're weighing a couple of options of sources we can help you with
  • 00:36:24
    sort of think through those problems.
  • 00:36:27
    If there are questions that would require us to go to a department to get more, I'm going to ask you if that's okay or if it's confidential and we can work through that together.
  • 00:36:37
    The more specific your questions are, the better the answer might be.
  • 00:36:42
    And then, of course, as we get to amendment time, we'll appreciate talking through all the specifics of your proposals that we can think about implementation and how departments will be able to carry out whatever it is that you are seeking to have them do.
  • 00:36:58
    And with that, I will say thank you and pause if there's any questions.
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 00:37:04
    Thank you, Director DeCenza, colleagues.
  • 00:37:07
    Are there any questions for the budget director?
  • 00:37:11
    Council President Payne.
• • Elliott Payne
  • 00:37:14
    Thank you, Madam Chair.
  • 00:37:15
    I was curious if you could just explain the permanent improvement fund a little bit more.
  • 00:37:19
    Kind of what the context and background of that is, or the levy.
• • Jayne Discenza
  • 00:37:23
    Yeah, sure.
  • 00:37:24
    So through the Chair, Council President Payne, the permanent improvement levy has been on the books for at least the last several years.
  • 00:37:33
    And it has been used for a variety of things in the past.
  • 00:37:37
    I believe in last year's budget, we used it to cover the cost of some public works equipment, like those asphalt rollers and maybe the snow storage site.
  • 00:37:46
    And the idea here was to be really clear about where those dollars are going, what we can spend them on.
  • 00:37:52
    and also give us an opportunity as a city as technology costs are really increasing with the subscription models and also the elevated standards for things like dashboards and the need for heightened cybersecurity that we have a place to have those conversations in a really intentional way.
  • 00:38:10
    And so the permanent improvement levy is part of the, has been part of the general fund.
  • 00:38:15
    We've kind of pulled it aside now though so that it can be considered largely for technology pieces.
  • 00:38:21
    We do plan to present a six-year plan like we do for capital I would say this is still on its infant stages So there's some building out of those out years that still needs to happen but in an ideal world We're programming all of all of those dollars throughout the six years that we have a really robust plan going forward of how we're using that Love you Thank you
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 00:38:43
    Thank you.
  • 00:38:43
    And Vice Chair Koski.
• • Emily Koski
  • 00:38:47
    Thank you Madam Chair.
  • 00:38:48
    Thank you Director for the presentation and first thank you to the entire department for this amazing information and very transparent, very detailed and the budget book looks incredible.
  • 00:39:01
    I just appreciate, I know that
  • 00:39:04
    constituents already can see the difference of how they're able to navigate through it so just want to say thank you for all your hard work and everything you've put into this this year.
  • 00:39:14
    I do have a couple questions just these are a little nitty-gritty so some of them might have to come back later too so
  • 00:39:22
    You talked a lot about the Public Safety Aid, so I appreciate that.
  • 00:39:26
    And in the budget book, it notes that the Public Safety Aid Reserve Fund is listed as the source for two budget proposals.
  • 00:39:37
    In this presentation, you noted it is also the source for additional personnel programming costs.
  • 00:39:44
    Where and how is this presented in the budget book?
  • 00:39:47
    Where can I find that?
• • Jayne Discenza
  • 00:39:49
    Sure, so through the chair, Vice Chair Koski, so the public safety aid is discussed a bit on the city spending page where we're talking about use of fund balance, given that part of it is being used in that way.
  • 00:40:03
    The other portion, the other elements of the public safety aid I think are
  • 00:40:11
    The outcomes of that work is described on both the REIB page as well as OCS and civil rights.
  • 00:40:17
    So talking about the proposal to build out the framework for the racial equity framework in REIB, that uses a portion or that's part of that conversation with the background checks.
  • 00:40:33
    So I think largely the discussion is here, but we lay out the specifics of the outcomes in the budget book.
• • Emily Koski
  • 00:40:41
    Okay, because I know you mentioned the Neighborhood Safety Department specifically, so I'm just curious of why there isn't a mention or a section around that in the Neighborhood Safety Department in the budget book.
• • Jayne Discenza
  • 00:40:55
    Sure.
  • 00:40:58
    Council Vice President Chug Thai, Vice Chair Koski.
  • 00:41:03
    Those dollars are being used on a one-time basis to sort of buy down the levy and so the idea is that it's just offsetting general funds Because public safety dollars are in the general fund already.
  • 00:41:14
    It's not as obvious in those financial tables that there's a shift in source
  • 00:41:18
    there, but it's meant to just sort of relieve some pressure on a one-time basis and then smooth sailing back to the standard general fund in future years.
• • Emily Koski
  • 00:41:27
    Okay, so will we or will we not see that in an actual budget proposal through when neighborhood safety comes forward?
  • 00:41:34
    Will they be noting that it's they're utilizing public safety aid funding?
• • Jayne Discenza
  • 00:41:38
    Through the Chair, Vice Chair Koski, we can certainly have them discuss that further, but because it's all general fund, it does not show up in a very obvious way.
• • Emily Koski
  • 00:41:47
    okay and then same on the same public safety aid I was wondering if does the recommended budget reallocate any of the existing public safety aid and if so within what budget proposals
• • Jayne Discenza
  • 00:42:02
    Sure.
  • 00:42:03
    So the two impacted areas are the PSA remainder, which we've talked about, which was that I think there's just four and a half million remaining after this summer's activity in that area.
  • 00:42:13
    And so that's the part that's sort of buying down the levy.
  • 00:42:16
    And then the other impacted aspect of the PSA is the truth and reconciliation work.
  • 00:42:21
    And so the dollars from that
  • 00:42:24
    were discussed throughout the summer, what's likely to be spent and what isn't.
  • 00:42:29
    We know in working with REIB over the past year that it's been a little bit tricky to figure out how to use those dollars in a way that aligns with the state's intention for them.
  • 00:42:40
    to do the kind of work that REIB wants to do might not necessarily be an easy fit with the public safety aid intention.
  • 00:42:46
    And so the idea was let's shift those dollars that they're not likely to spend this year to something that's very clearly aligned with public safety, so those background checks for sworn police.
  • 00:42:56
    And then we can use general fund to fill in the gap in REIB so that they can do whatever it is that they need to do without concern for if the state will like that spending or not.
• • Emily Koski
  • 00:43:06
    Okay, that's really helpful.
  • 00:43:09
    Switching gears a bit here.
  • 00:43:11
    How does the city budget for labor contracts and where is this represented in the budget book?
• • Jayne Discenza
  • 00:43:17
    Council Vice President Ching Hai, Vice Chair Koski.
  • 00:43:20
    So labor contracts are part of that CSL process.
  • 00:43:23
    So when we are working on the personnel budget early in the year, we're touching base with our friends in labor relations to understand what's open and what's not.
  • 00:43:33
    And we're looking at what are some reasonable assumptions for percent increases We're never gonna hold the personnel budget flat because we know that's not realistic but we have to strike that balance of not over collecting as well and so
  • 00:43:48
    We you'll see the impact of the of the labor agreements in any of the personnel account codes So when you're looking at a department if you're seeing that their personnel and fringe category is increasing That is going to be due to the the colas that are either actual or what we've assumed for going forward Okay.
• • Emily Koski
  • 00:44:07
    Thank you.
  • 00:44:08
    Appreciate that and then in this mayor's recommended budget and by anybody what is the contingency fund balance and
• • Jayne Discenza
  • 00:44:18
    Through the chair vice chair Koski we have budgeted I believe it's about seven million in contingency We financial policies call for us to maintain about 1% for contingency So I believe it's about seven million at the moment.
  • 00:44:33
    We can okay can confirm that for you.
• • Emily Koski
  • 00:44:35
    Okay, great.
  • 00:44:36
    Thank you I know that we've held a higher balance in the past few years.
  • 00:44:40
    So I was just curious to see where that was landing with us and
  • 00:44:42
    And then for the budget proposals using the special revenue fund as a source, can you provide the specific source for each of those?
• • Jayne Discenza
  • 00:44:53
    Sure, through the chair, Vice Chair Koski, the special revenue fund is kind of a big category, so there'd be any grant funds.
  • 00:45:00
    We probably tagged all of the technology improvements with special revenue funds, so certainly we could provide more specifics on that.
• • Emily Koski
  • 00:45:08
    Okay, that would be helpful.
  • 00:45:10
    All right.
  • 00:45:10
    Thank you so much, and again, thank you to the team.
  • 00:45:12
    Thank you.
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 00:45:13
    Wonderful, thank you.
  • 00:45:14
    And then Vice Chair Koski, I'll note for the clerks for administrative follow-ups and questions on the specific amount that is in contingency for 2025, budgeted for 2025 and 2026, along with some more specifics related to what accounts for the special revenue fund.
  • 00:45:40
    Is that accurate?
  • 00:45:42
    Got it.
  • 00:45:42
    Thank you.
  • 00:45:42
    Wonderful.
  • 00:45:43
    Thank you.
  • 00:45:44
    Next I'll recognize Councilmember Rainville.
• • Michael Rainville
  • 00:45:48
    Thank you, Madam Chair.
  • 00:45:50
    I can't tell from here, but I thought I saw the Chief come in.
  • 00:45:53
    Is the Chief here?
  • 00:45:55
    He's there.
  • 00:45:57
    I'm wondering if I could just speak to you directly, Chief, if you don't mind, Budget Director.
  • 00:46:05
    Good morning.
  • 00:46:07
    You're hiding behind the pillar.
  • 00:46:09
    First of all, I just have to compliment your officers on the great job they're doing during this horrific shooting that we're having and I can't imagine how terrified the people were over on Minnehaha to late at night have an active shooter in their apartment building but
  • 00:46:27
    the bravery of your officers to address that shooter and to neutralize them and make those residents safe.
  • 00:46:33
    So just please pass that on to all your commanders and your officers.
  • 00:46:40
    You weren't here yet when we talk about the 45% increase in the sales tax revenue from downtown Minneapolis.
  • 00:46:47
    And that's attributed to people being feeling safe when they come down here.
  • 00:46:52
    And I'm not trying to micromanage you or your staff, but as you talk about how you allocate your budget next year, that late night safety plan is part of that safety for people and that 45% increase in sales tax.
  • 00:47:06
    So I just wanted to put that in.
  • 00:47:09
    I'll dig on into it a little deeper when you do your budget presentations as a department.
• • SPEAKER_08
  • 00:47:14
    Thank you.
• • Michael Rainville
  • 00:47:15
    But most of all, I just want to pass on gratitude for the great job that your officers are doing.
• • SPEAKER_08
  • 00:47:20
    Thank you, Council Member.
• • Michael Rainville
  • 00:47:21
    Thank you.
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 00:47:23
    Wonderful.
  • 00:47:24
    Did you have any questions for the Budget Director or related to the specific topic we're discussing, the budget overview?
• • Michael Rainville
  • 00:47:31
    No, I didn't.
  • 00:47:34
    I'll have questions as we dig down into it, but I think the Department Director, if I still have the floor, you're doing a great job.
  • 00:47:41
    Thank you for being so transparent and open.
• • Jayne Discenza
  • 00:47:44
    Through the chair if I may I just got one of the answers to the questions about contingency It is a flat seven million across the board wonderful.
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 00:47:55
    Thank you Director for your awareness there are about four more council members in queue, and then we'll move on to the next presentation Next I'll recognize council member Chowdhury
• • Aurin Chowdhury
  • 00:48:09
    Thank you, Madam Chair.
  • 00:48:12
    I was gonna ask my questions related to the budget, actually not questions, comments, but since we brought up 4,000 Minnehaha, I have to speak to it if that's alright with you.
  • 00:48:24
    That's Ward 12, that's about six-ish blocks away from where I live and
  • 00:48:34
    That was a really scary situation for the residents in the area, particularly the residents in the building.
  • 00:48:42
    I'm deeply grateful for the first responders that showed up and came and helped the community there because it was a senseless act of gun violence.
  • 00:48:57
    Someone that lived within that building who had access to military-grade weapons
  • 00:49:04
    and we are very fortunate that no one that was a resident in the neighborhood was hurt and I'm very thankful for that and I just have to acknowledge in this moment in our country where each day we're dealing with mass shootings thinking about Winder, Georgia, Apalachee High School, a lot of the students there
  • 00:49:23
    It shook the community over there because everything is so raw and so I had to just take a second to mention that.
  • 00:49:31
    One thing that I really want to work with this body and anyone else that's listening is figuring out how we can get some
  • 00:49:38
    Supportive trauma-informed resources to the residents that live within that building.
  • 00:49:43
    I know that there's some relationships there to the county if there's any nonprofits or people that we can work with.
  • 00:49:48
    I would love to work with our city enterprise to figure out how we can connect with those residents because I bet it's really hard to go back and stay at that apartment building and that neighborhood.
  • 00:49:58
    And that part of the community is very strong.
  • 00:50:00
    People really take care of each other there.
  • 00:50:02
    So if we can work together
  • 00:50:04
    That would mean a great deal to me and the people that live over there.
  • 00:50:08
    So, thanks for that.
  • 00:50:10
    Okay.
  • 00:50:12
    Budget.
  • 00:50:16
    Thank you for your presentation.
  • 00:50:18
    And thank you to the budget team for all of your work.
  • 00:50:21
    Really have appreciated it.
  • 00:50:22
    I know you're around the clock.
  • 00:50:23
    Thank you to our chair and vice chair.
  • 00:50:25
    And I know that you're now just getting to the start of the fun with us.
  • 00:50:32
    So I look forward to the conversations that we have.
  • 00:50:35
    I'm anticipating just having a one-to-one meeting with the director and some teams to go through my questions.
  • 00:50:41
    I'm really absorbing today.
  • 00:50:42
    But I wanted to take this moment to kind of uplift a piece of something that we can work on together looking into next year, into the future.
  • 00:50:50
    You touched on local government aid.
  • 00:50:51
    We get 82 million every year about and then I learned today that we approximate some of it to NBC and the parks.
  • 00:50:59
    One thing that I learned is that with how the formula is done at the state level, St. Paul also gets 82 million, the same amount.
  • 00:51:08
    Per capita that's different because we have a higher population and we have some greater needs because of that.
  • 00:51:14
    And so one thing that I think we can help do to kind of increase the amount of money that we have within our budget is really look at local government aid together and advocate at the Capitol and talk to our delegation to get more.
  • 00:51:26
    I felt like this was an appropriate time to kind of bring that up.
  • 00:51:29
    since we touched on it and so that's something that I'm looking forward to Director DeCenza if you have any thoughts on that please do share but that's something I'd love to dialogue on as we're going through the rest of the budget process.
• • Jayne Discenza
  • 00:51:43
    Chair Chugtai, Councilmember Choudhury, I think that was one of those pieces of legislation at the session for the state that just kind of fell by the wayside last minute and so I think we were hoping for a little bit more of an increase but I believe the the chair has been working really hard to think about that calculation.
  • 00:52:02
    I know it's something our IGR team is also working on so happy to be in conversation about that.
  • 00:52:07
    Awesome, let's get it done.
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 00:52:10
    Wonderful, thank you Councilmember.
  • 00:52:12
    Next, I'll recognize Councilmember Wonsley, followed by Councilmember Chavez.
• • Robin Wonsley
  • 00:52:18
    Thank you, Council Vice President Chug Thai.
  • 00:52:20
    I just had a clarifying question back to Vice Chair Koski's point raised earlier.
  • 00:52:27
    So, on slide 14, there's slightly different context around these police, or sorry, the background checks.
  • 00:52:35
    It says for
  • 00:52:37
    innovative service delivery pilots, but you just shared that it was for background checks for police.
  • 00:52:45
    So I just wanted to get clarification.
  • 00:52:47
    Is this just for clearing background checks for police or is this for something else?
• • Jayne Discenza
  • 00:52:55
    Through the Chair, Councilmember Wonsley, I think it is an innovation to outsource some of our more extensive background checks.
  • 00:53:03
    It's something that impacts the police department as well as, for example, the Office of Police Conduct Review and Civil Rights.
  • 00:53:09
    And so the idea here is to try something different so that our sworn staff are not spending their time on all of those things.
  • 00:53:16
    They will still have to do a portion of it.
  • 00:53:18
    But this is a way for us to pilot something new, see if it works, see if it helps clear the backlog quicker.
  • 00:53:24
    And it's also something that's very clearly eligible for public safety aid as it's tied to getting those positions filled.
  • 00:53:32
    So in that sense, I would argue it is innovative.
• • Robin Wonsley
  • 00:53:36
    where the innovation is a little bit of a discrepancy here is it says public safety position so maybe there's a lack of just maybe vagueness in the context of its written because it could have just said law enforcement personnel.
  • 00:53:48
    When I see public safety positions, knowing that we also have the Office of Community Safety wanted to know is this also tied to background checks for
  • 00:53:56
    some of the newer components of safety positions that we're adding there because there's been lots of concerns around vetting of those type of positions or contractors as well so just it would be good to know more specifically what is tied to law enforcement and what is not tied to law enforcement in our funding because I see those as two separate things in some ways and one to know in their substantial budget what's been covering background checks thus far.
• • Jayne Discenza
  • 00:54:25
    Sure, so through the chair, I don't think there's a discrepancy.
  • 00:54:28
    I think we're in agreement.
  • 00:54:29
    So this budget is split between the funding for the background checks is going to Office of Community Safety and to Civil Rights.
  • 00:54:38
    Civil Rights does not employ law enforcement, but they do have police conduct review.
  • 00:54:41
    And so the idea here is that we're hitting those positions that require the CJIS background check, which is more extensive than the background check that I, for example, had to undergo as a city staffer.
  • 00:54:53
    I mentioned law enforcement position, sworn positions, because that's a very obvious one that we could use these dollars on.
  • 00:54:59
    It's sort of a slam dunk, but there are other positions like those police conduct review ones and perhaps others within Office of Community Safety that would require that more expansive background check.
• • Robin Wonsley
  • 00:55:10
    Do you know, I see Jared Jeffries here of if there's any recognition of which of those other positions this could go to service sorts.
• • SPEAKER_07
  • 00:55:24
    Chair Sugtai, Council Member Wonsley, so Director DeCenza hit the nail on the head on those positions that require background checks prior to hiring.
  • 00:55:36
    So some positions we have to do that before we hire, such as police officers and 911 call takers and dispatchers.
  • 00:55:44
    that's the other big bucket that's also covered here as well.
  • 00:55:48
    That will be externally background checked here.
• • Robin Wonsley
  • 00:55:52
    Okay, so 9-1-1.
  • 00:55:54
    Okay, thank you.
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 00:55:55
    Other questions I had, thank you.
• • Jason Chavez
  • 00:55:58
    I just have a question about the 8.1% increase.
  • 00:56:09
    I think you mentioned that the 4.5 million from the public safety aid was used to
  • 00:56:14
    Basically lessen the impact on the levy and reduce it.
  • 00:56:18
    I guess my questions are you probably remember the City Council was asked to approve Use the public safety aid for bonuses and that was voted down and then the City Council was then asked to use the majority of this public safety aid to pay for the police unit contract and defund public safety services in the city and I guess my question is do you know if
  • 00:56:38
    If those would have not been voted down, because it's now being used to lower the levy, and the mayor is now using it to lower the levy, what, or less than the impact of the levy, what percentage of the levy would we have received if council would have not voted down the funding for those sources?
• • Jayne Discenza
  • 00:56:56
    Through the chair Chug Thai to council members Chavez I might need to do some math on that but I can tell you so how it would work if we were to pull that four and a half million out of This recommended budget what you would see is that an additional Unless we made other cuts right if there would be an additional four and a half million added to that top line general fund amount
  • 00:57:17
    So that would ultimately result in $515 million being levied overall rather than $510.
  • 00:57:26
    So that would be a little bit under an additional percentage point.
  • 00:57:31
    So we'd be looking at upper eights, probably, in terms of the property tax levy.
  • 00:57:36
    I would need to go back and look at all the various proposed changes because truly I can't do it off the top of my head.
  • 00:57:42
    That's a good question.
• • Jason Chavez
  • 00:57:43
    And if we can just have our clerks note that down, that question, that would be really helpful because I think understanding the situation here is like given, in my opinion, if council wouldn't have taken those actions, the levy impact would have been harder.
  • 00:57:55
    So that's just information that I want to have access to.
  • 00:57:58
    Thank you.
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 00:57:59
    Yep, so thank you Councilmember.
  • 00:58:01
    Any further questions from you?
  • 00:58:04
    Okay.
  • 00:58:04
    And so for clerks, if this is going back to an action maybe from a year ago, the $15 million recruitment retention letter of agreement package, that's what the Councilmember is referencing.
  • 00:58:21
    And finally, I see Councilmember Palmisano.
• • Linea Palmisano
  • 00:58:26
    I also want to say thank you to you and your team.
  • 00:58:34
    I continue to see you as a fairly new budget director in terms of my tenure here continue to innovate.
  • 00:58:41
    Moving your budget books to online tools is no small task.
  • 00:58:47
    I see these online tools and resources definitely as a measure of transparency and other good work by you and your office, so thank you.
  • 00:58:55
    I also know that the assessor's tools that you had highlighted in your slide deck are being used by residents.
  • 00:59:04
    It's not real I would say specific enough for some of the people who are living on fixed incomes and very concerned and see things like an 8.1% levy, you know, they do still Not it they still incorrectly translate that as an 8.1% change to their own property tax picture and there is lots of worry about
  • 00:59:28
    I was reminded of this in the slide where you broke down in our city levy here are the different amounts of what a average home would would be paying toward I think that's helpful, but I also want to just say And for my colleagues really that this is only part of the tax picture for our residents that there's the county taxes and there's
  • 00:59:50
    There's a school levy ballot measure that, assuming that it passes in November, will also add an increased cost to the tax burden on our residents.
  • 01:00:03
    So there's a lot of worry and concern about this level of tax levy, not just here but across the board.
  • 01:00:11
    I am a little bit concerned about how we maintain our extremely important triple A rating and I was wondering Director DeCenza could you just opine briefly about what are the fund balances that go into determining that triple A rating and that is both informative and also a little bit of a caution on us as we look to make budget amendments and not dip into those things that are going to affect our bond rating.
• • Jayne Discenza
  • 01:00:38
    So through the Chair, Councilmember Palmisano, first I'll just be indulgent and say thanks all of you for noticing the great work of the team.
  • 01:00:46
    I really am proud of the budget division.
  • 01:00:48
    They are all really excellent and I think my first rule of leadership is hire people who are smarter than you.
  • 01:00:54
    And they definitely elevate the work every day.
  • 01:00:59
    But as to bond ratings,
  • 01:01:02
    CFO Dai is certainly the expert on this.
  • 01:01:05
    I'm not really part of those bond calls.
  • 01:01:07
    I believe that might be something she's doing today But I do know that the bond agencies are looking for sustainability in our finances So they're looking that we have a long-term strategy Which is one of those reasons why we pulled out the cash from the out years so that we can show we are Levying enough to cover our expenses
  • 01:01:25
    So when we make changes to that planned use of fund balance, that is one thing that might be noticed by those agencies.
  • 01:01:34
    We have had, you know, just the realities of COVID and understaffing those several years, we've had a lot of dollars that have fallen to the bottom line.
  • 01:01:43
    When we're doing our cash projections for the budget We have to assume that all those things get spent all those dollars get spent because they're for they're for people They're for the staff that we have and the programs that we plan to carry out and so When we're looking at in the budget book, we do talk a bit about the cash balance We showed two hundred and thirty million dollars of cash balance at the end of the year in 2023
  • 01:02:07
    The fund balance so the distinction is the cash is just what's in the bank the fund balance takes into account some of those Liabilities that we would have to pay out if the bill came due so the fund balance is 210 million At the end of 2023, but the unassigned portion of that is 139 So we have a lot of commitments within that so that brings down the amount that's available in
  • 01:02:29
    Quite a bit from from 230 down to 139 so it's something that we have to be mindful of as we're as we're figuring out what the Recommended cash uses in the future years Thank you Wonderful and I'll recognize councilmember Chavez again.
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 01:02:51
    I
• • Jason Chavez
  • 01:02:51
    Thank you Council Vice President Chuktay, Chair Chuktay, and then I just have one last question regarding Councilmember Palmesano's comment.
  • 01:02:58
    I think can you remind us how much the mayor recommended of that cash fund balance?
  • 01:03:02
    Is it 14.2 million in this budget?
• • Jayne Discenza
  • 01:03:06
    Through the Chair, Councilmember Chavez, yes, so 14.2 plus that four and a half million.
  • 01:03:12
    So that brings us closer to 19 million.
• • Jason Chavez
  • 01:03:15
    Thank you.
  • 01:03:16
    Appreciate it.
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 01:03:20
    I am not seeing any further questions.
  • 01:03:22
    Thank you for this presentation, Director.
  • 01:03:23
    I will ask the Clerk to file that presentation.
  • 01:03:28
    And we will now move on to our next presentation, which is on the budget related to the Minnesota Department of Human Rights Settlement Agreement and the U.S. Department of Justice Consent Decree.
  • 01:03:41
    We will be hearing from several departments on this topic, including the Office of Community Safety
  • 01:03:46
    the budget division in finance, the police department and IT.
  • 01:03:54
    We have several staff on hand to give this presentation but Jared Jeffries from the Office of Community Safety will get us started so I will now invite him to begin this presentation and colleagues you'll remember the last couple of years we've had a separate presentation
  • 01:04:09
    on the budget impact related to the settlement agreement and as the mayor discussed in his budget address, this is going to be one of the most significant areas of growth and investment in this year's budget contributing to the levy impact.
  • 01:04:25
    So we wanted to start off this cycle with a presentation on the settlement agreement and any questions that are not answered will go to the clerks for further follow-up.
  • 01:04:36
    Mr. Jeffries, you're welcome to get started.
  • 01:04:38
    Thank you.
• • SPEAKER_07
  • 01:04:39
    Thank you, Chair Sugtai, Vice Chair Koski, Budget Committee members, good morning.
  • 01:04:44
    I am Jared Jeffries, I am the Chief of Staff for the Office of Community Safety here at the City of Minneapolis.
  • 01:04:50
    With me today to present on the 2025 settlement agreement budget proposals are budget manager Justin Coles, MPD Deputy Chief of Constitutional Policing Travis Glampy, MPD Finance Director Vicki Troswick, and Chief Information Officer Paul Cameron.
  • 01:05:08
    In this presentation, we'll go through an overview of the settlement agreement, a recap of the settlement agreement 2024 adopted budget, spending and obligated reserve, and a summary of the 2025-2026 mayoral recommendations in regards to the settlement agreement for MPD and IT.
  • 01:05:29
    So what is in the settlement agreement?
  • 01:05:32
    As a refresher, you'll probably recall the settlement agreement is with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights, or MDHR, and it resolves MDHR's legal claims against the city regarding its findings related to the city's policing practices.
  • 01:05:47
    The Hennepin County District Court approved the settlement agreement and issued its court order on July 13, 2023, which made the agreement court enforceable.
  • 01:06:02
    The Selman Agreement is a very lengthy 144 pages and contains over 400 paragraphs that covers several issues that must be addressed by the city, some of which is already underway.
  • 01:06:14
    This includes significant work by the police department on community engagement, creating or changing policies, developing trainings based on those policies, data collection and analysis on how those policies and trainings are impacting the department's performance in key areas, and includes accountability for when policies and trainings are not followed.
  • 01:06:37
    Overall is the city's responsibility to comply with the settlement agreement but certain departments play a larger role such as police, city attorney's office, civil rights, and IT.
  • 01:06:48
    And pursuant to the settlement agreement, the city is obligated to resource sufficiently those departments and those not mentioned to meet the agreement's requirements which can be found in paragraph 437 of the settlement agreement.
  • 01:07:05
    Again, just to summarize what I stated in the previous slide, the way that the City actually implements the settlement agreement and shows compliance is through implementation of policy as required by the agreement, training on those policies, and ensuring those policies and trainings are followed in ongoing performance, including through accountability and data analysis.
  • 01:07:27
    I'll now turn it over to Budget Manager Justin Coles to give a brief overview of last year's financials.
• • Justin Coles
  • 01:07:36
    Good morning Council Vice President Chagatai committee members.
  • 01:07:39
    My name is Justin Coles budget manager within finance and property services So in this slide, we're just recapping what's already been approved for investment in the 2024 budget So city attorney's office received two FTEs senior advisor as well as an attorney civil rights received three case investigators as well as some non-personnel dollars for research and training contracts and
  • 01:08:02
    Police received the bulk of it at 28 FTEs, part of which were started to hire in 23, but full force within 24 as they were ramping up the implementation unit.
  • 01:08:12
    and finally IT received about 500k for the early intervention system and an FTE to administer that program.
  • 01:08:22
    We have linked the August 12th change item updates here for anyone that's interested for an update of where those hiring and spending are within those investments.
  • 01:08:36
    So going a bit deeper into how we fund settlement agreement, the city maintains a obligated fund balance within the general fund.
  • 01:08:44
    In 2025, that is $8 million.
  • 01:08:46
    Going forward, it will be $5 million in future years.
  • 01:08:49
    And it's primarily to address one-time or emergent needs within settlement agreement compliance.
  • 01:08:54
    So any personnel or other ongoing expenses you would not see through being used through the reserve, those would come forward to you all as a budget decision.
  • 01:09:05
    There is a request process that goes to the CFO for any of those one-time spending requests that would then be covered by that obligated reserve.
  • 01:09:13
    We included here a couple of examples on previously approved reserve spending, most notably at the top here, the independent evaluator.
  • 01:09:22
    The process for these does get approved through the CFO and the expenses will hit the department's budget So that's where you would see it and when those expenses exceed the department's budget that it would be covered by the reserve So as I mentioned on the previous slide departments are still kind of ramping up to do this work And so we have not needed to use any of the obligated reserve in prior years We do anticipate this year that that would change and we will use some of that reserve for some of the higher contracts
  • 01:09:50
    And again the goal here is just to maintain budgetary flexibility and keep those one-time temporary costs off of the tax levy and within our reserve.
  • 01:10:02
    So a high-level summary here and then we'll pivot over to the departments to get into more detail but in the 25-26 recommended budgets there are two departments that are receiving additional funding and that is Police and IT.
  • 01:10:14
    Within Police it is a total of nine positions, seven in 2025 and two more in 2026.
  • 01:10:23
    NIT is requesting three positions.
  • 01:10:26
    This is primarily for the data transformation project that CIO Cameron will go over.
  • 01:10:32
    I will note that here we're just showing 25 and 26 since that is the budget planning year that we are looking at.
  • 01:10:39
    When that slide comes up, you will see 2027 requests that will be coming before you in that planning year.
  • 01:10:48
    And I will now turn it over to DC Glampy to discuss MPD's request.
• • SPEAKER_06
  • 01:10:58
    Good morning, Chair Ching Hai, Committee Members.
  • 01:11:01
    I'm Travis Glampy.
  • 01:11:02
    I'm the Deputy Chief of Constitutional Policing.
  • 01:11:05
    And the police's implementation unit falls underneath my bureau.
  • 01:11:08
    And as Mr. Coles put up there, last year we were approved for 28 full-time employees.
  • 01:11:17
    and we're just going to set forth here and show you what we did with the majority of those in the implementation unit.
  • 01:11:25
    How we took those, you know, kind of that raw cookie dough, if you will, and made it into something that's a functional unit now.
  • 01:11:34
    And so we took a number of employees and made them into a community engagement team who really kick things off their community engagement sessions and the ongoing engagement they do.
  • 01:11:46
    We also have a compliance team that's going to get a lot bigger because that will be as shown by Mr. Jeffries in how this thing is going to, we're going to become compliant is through our auditing and showing that we're doing the work that the requirement, the agreement requires we do.
  • 01:12:06
    So that's our compliance team and that is going to grow because that is going to be a significant amount of work in the data they're going to have to go through and process.
  • 01:12:16
    Along with that we have a data team, the business analysis, we have the analyst, we have the manager, the data scientist.
  • 01:12:26
    We can't do the compliance audits without that data and pulling all that data and all the things we're required to put out to the public.
  • 01:12:34
    So we created a team there just to make sure we're able to get all that data.
  • 01:12:39
    Policy development is
  • 01:12:42
    is the first and foremost thing we have to do as we showed earlier.
  • 01:12:47
    Along with an existing body the police department already had, we have a team of two to get these policies in compliance because we can't start training on those policies until they're in place and we can't start showing compliance until those policies have been trained on.
  • 01:13:06
    then we have our project managers, we also have a health and wellness subject matter expert, we have a couple of officers that were not part of the budget that was authorized specifically for the implementation team and then we have a curriculum development specialist that's going to assist us writing all this massive training we're going to do
  • 01:13:25
    Some of the positions you don't see here that were approved last year, some are in internal affairs.
  • 01:13:32
    We have some that went to the training division to train specifically to the things we're going to need to deal with with the settlement agreement and then our early intervention system.
  • 01:13:44
    We need to staff that and that is on its way and getting up and going.
  • 01:13:51
    And with that, I'll turn it over to Vicki Troswick, our MPD Finance Director.
• • SPEAKER_09
  • 01:13:56
    Thank you, Madam Chair, committee members.
  • 01:14:05
    My name is Vicki Troswick and I'm Finance Director in the Police Department.
  • 01:14:09
    I would like to briefly go over the mayor's recommended funding for proposals for the police department related to the settlement agreement.
  • 01:14:16
    I'm going to briefly discuss the positions and how they're related to the settlement agreement and their high-level roles.
  • 01:14:24
    So the mayor's recommended two compliance specialists in 2025, an additional two in 2026.
  • 01:14:30
    These will be part of the implementation team that D.C. Glampy was just talking about.
  • 01:14:35
    They work collaboratively with the city attorney and the MPD staff so that they can report the progress toward fulfilling the terms of the agreement.
  • 01:14:42
    So they come up with an audit plan.
  • 01:14:44
    They pick specific policies and procedures.
  • 01:14:48
    They develop the methodology and then they prepare an audit and
  • 01:14:51
    scorecards so that they can assess if policies and procedures were followed.
  • 01:14:57
    The best practices for an agency of this size is six, so with this proposal we'll achieve that by 2026.
  • 01:15:03
    This will create a more robust compliance team so that we can increase our monitoring and reporting because we do anticipate that the workload will increase with the updated policies and procedures.
  • 01:15:18
    The next five positions
  • 01:15:20
    The three training instructors, the curriculum development specialist, and the data coordinator, all five of those positions will be in our training unit.
  • 01:15:28
    These tasks were formally performed by sworn staff, so this is civilianizing those roles to the extent possible.
  • 01:15:38
    These positions were key to meeting the needs of the settlement agreement as well as outlined in the 2024 training needs assessment.
  • 01:15:45
    So for the three training instructors, the settlement agreement states that there needs to be an adequate number of qualified instructors for the pre-service academy, the field training, and the in-service training.
  • 01:15:57
    The requirements in the settlement as requested by the
  • 01:16:01
    by ALIFA and the MDHR is to provide consistent, reliable instruction with the proper trainee to instructor ratio.
  • 01:16:09
    And this was performed by part-time or full-time officers working overtime in the past, so that does lead to inconsistencies.
  • 01:16:16
    So this proposal is also in support of employee wellness.
  • 01:16:20
    These positions, they conduct the training.
  • 01:16:22
    They develop, analyze, and evaluate the training requirements.
  • 01:16:26
    They will be creating the roll call training program and facilitating the implementation.
  • 01:16:32
    And they assist with the testing and the exam processes.
  • 01:16:37
    for the curriculum development specialist.
  • 01:16:40
    The settlement requires that all the training lesson plans get reviewed and revised if necessary.
  • 01:16:47
    And they need to be consistent, have quality compliance with the applicable law with MPD policy, and work closely with the curriculum development specialist that's in the implementation team.
  • 01:17:00
    They're required to include adult learning techniques.
  • 01:17:03
    They collaborate with the community for subject matter experts.
  • 01:17:07
    they need to use the critical decision-making model that will reduce use of force, improve officer safety as well as community safety.
  • 01:17:16
    And then finally the data coordinator position that's also in the training unit.
  • 01:17:21
    This position, the settlement agreement requires that we have to maintain all of our training and all the supporting documentation and historically that's not been computerized so they're also working on computerizing at the
  • 01:17:36
    Some of the historical data as well as keeping current with the new training This position is a really large support role from gathering instructor resumes to creating the agendas the certifications post training It's a really large effort for this team and they will round out the training That concludes my police proposals related to the settlement agreement
  • 01:18:04
    For reference, most of this information, the requirements in the settlement agreement, is in paragraph 185, 189, and 195 for reference.
  • 01:18:14
    Now I'm happy to introduce the CIO, Paul Cameron.
• • SPEAKER_16
  • 01:18:30
    Good morning, Chair Chigtai and members of the Budget Committee.
  • 01:18:34
    I'm Paul Cameron, the Chief Information Officer for the City, and I'm here to present the information technology portion of the Mayor's recommended budget for the settlement agreement, a public safety data transformation.
  • 01:18:47
    This request is the primary recommendation from the settlement agreement mandated data collection assessment completed by Accenture earlier this year.
  • 01:18:59
    This request will provide one-time funding and FTEs to modernize the data platforms, tools, and data collection processes, public safety focused at first, eventually rolling out to the entire enterprise.
  • 01:19:15
    So the IT department has a vision of building a self-service reporting and analytic set of tools and data repositories.
  • 01:19:23
    The visible manifestation of this work is the data source on the city's website.
  • 01:19:30
    So the current environment has its strengths but also some weaknesses that prevent us from fully realizing our goals as an enterprise.
  • 01:19:38
    The architecture proposed in the assessment will help address those weaknesses and move the city to a more resilient, future-ready architecture that improves data integration, data quality auditing, and provides easier to use reporting and analytic tools.
  • 01:20:00
    We are requesting approximately $2 million in 2025, $4 million in 2026, and $3.2 million in 2027.
  • 01:20:13
    The one-time portion of this money will be used for professional services and software tools to help with the initial work to migrate to a public government cloud infrastructure.
  • 01:20:25
    The four FTEs, three starting in 2025 and one in 2027 will be used for a combination of purposes.
  • 01:20:35
    First, they will help build institutional knowledge within IT for operating and maintaining these environments.
  • 01:20:41
    Second, they will increase our capacity to work with the Office of Community Safety on how they and the enterprise can utilize their data.
  • 01:20:52
    Technology projects are often a combination of people, process, and technology.
  • 01:20:57
    The FTE requests for this project are meant to help across those three areas.
  • 01:21:03
    I also want to take a minute to comment on how the IT department has been trying to position itself over the last year knowing that assessment was coming.
  • 01:21:12
    So the FTE mentioned earlier
  • 01:21:15
    that we received last year as part of the settlement agreement is a database engineer currently working on the EIS project.
  • 01:21:22
    That work with the EIS system will naturally transition into this data transformation project as it progresses.
  • 01:21:30
    IT has also repurposed funding for four FTEs that will contribute in a substantial way to this work.
  • 01:21:38
    Those FTEs cover database administration and cyber security These roles are crucial as we move into a more complex cloud environment So thank you, and I believe I'll turn it back over to Jared
• • SPEAKER_07
  • 01:21:59
    Thank you council members that concludes our presentation and as you'll see here there are links to the Summit Agreement budget book page Police budget book page and IT budget book page, but staff are happy to stand for questions that the committee may have
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 01:22:12
    Wonderful.
  • 01:22:12
    Thank you all for your presentation.
  • 01:22:14
    And colleagues, are there any questions?
  • 01:22:18
    I will start by recognizing Council Member Wonsley, followed by Vice Chair Koski.
• • Robin Wonsley
  • 01:22:23
    Thank you, Council Vice President Chuktai.
  • 01:22:26
    And this probably goes both for staff and probably Council President Payne.
  • 01:22:33
    One, trying to get a sense of the 1.5 million dollars that we allocated to the independent evaluator, which is Alifa now, if that's also inclusive of their operating budget and if that's factored into this budget or if they're separate.
  • 01:22:47
    In that, I'm asking because it would be great to get an update directly from Alifa.
  • 01:22:52
    I know they're supposed to be embarking on their 90-day plan and wanted to know are we also covering the
  • 01:22:58
    you know provisions that they include in that 90-day plan that's also supposed to go towards supporting us and you know being in compliance with the settlement agreement so just trying to get a sense of the role where ELIFA plays into this.
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 01:23:11
    If it's okay with you, Mr. Jeffries, I'm actually going to have the Council President speak to the discussions related to Alifa presenting before Council and the City Attorney isn't here herself.
  • 01:23:25
    And actually I don't believe we have anyone here with us at this exact moment.
  • 01:23:29
    So if you can take the first stab at that and then Mr. Jeffries will come to you.
• • Elliott Payne
  • 01:23:33
    Thank you Vice President.
  • 01:23:35
    Yes, I've been working with the City Attorney's Office to get a presentation from Alifa on their 90-day plan.
  • 01:23:42
    That 90 days has kind of come and gone.
  • 01:23:44
    My understanding is that the requirement in the settlement agreement for the 90 days was to get the draft for review, not necessarily the final document in front of us as a body is how the CAO has described it, at least to me.
  • 01:24:00
    Whether or not
  • 01:24:02
    you or I accept that.
  • 01:24:04
    It's a different conversation.
  • 01:24:05
    And the hope is to see a much more clear work plan on their behalf.
  • 01:24:12
    And I actually have some questions also as a follow-up that actually are in alignment with Councilmember Wanzi, so maybe we should allow her to finish her questions.
• • Robin Wonsley
  • 01:24:22
    I also then tagged that as a staff memo and it's kind of strange that we don't have anyone from the CAO's office here, especially since we're talking about the settlement agreement.
  • 01:24:32
    Oh, we do.
  • 01:24:32
    Hey, you want to come up to the floor?
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 01:24:38
    Did you have something you wanted to just quick add before?
• • SPEAKER_07
  • 01:24:40
    Yes.
  • 01:24:41
    On your question, Council Member Wonsley, about where the 1.5 million for the independent value area actually shows up in any additional expenses, that is pulled from the settlement agreement reserve fund that Director DeCenza mentioned during her presentation.
  • 01:24:57
    So it's not reflected in this budget proposal.
• • Robin Wonsley
  • 01:25:00
    Got you.
  • 01:25:00
    And then the 1.5, that covers ELIFA's operating budget as well, or does it just cover
  • 01:25:07
    staff.
• • SPEAKER_07
  • 01:25:08
    We would need to check to confirm council member but I believe yes as part of the RFP process they have to submit their budget and so I do believe their operating expenses are included in that 1.5.
• • Robin Wonsley
  • 01:25:18
    It sounds like Jane did you understand?
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 01:25:21
    Within the settlement agreement is a specific maximum on how much we can we can spend on the independent evaluator on an annual basis that number is 1.5 million which is what we budget for and I believe that's what the director was going to get up to say.
• • Robin Wonsley
  • 01:25:34
    And then it sounds like for city attorneys unless are you able to provide some context of what council president mentioned in terms of when we can expect a presentation update either from Alifa in the CAO's office and when we would get that draft in front of this body.
  • 01:25:51
    of the 90-Day Plan.
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 01:25:52
    Yes, Councilmember Wonsley.
  • 01:25:53
    If you'll start by just introducing yourself, sir.
• • Jayne Discenza
  • 01:25:56
    Yes.
• • SPEAKER_12
  • 01:25:57
    My name's Adam Szymanski, I'm an Assistant City Attorney here.
  • 01:26:00
    Councilmember Wonsley, I don't have an answer to your first question at this time.
  • 01:26:05
    For the evaluation plan, I think it's safe to say we can expect that soon, possibly within two weeks.
  • 01:26:13
    The 90-day plan?
• • Robin Wonsley
  • 01:26:16
    The evaluation plan, that's correct, yes.
  • 01:26:17
    Great, that would be great.
  • 01:26:19
    And then I'm assuming that you all will be bringing forth a presentation in for the subcommittee to overview that then, around two weeks.
• • SPEAKER_12
  • 01:26:28
    I do not know the answer to that, Councilmember Wonsley.
  • 01:26:30
    I will get a response to you as soon as possible.
  • 01:26:32
    Please note that for the staff memo.
• • Robin Wonsley
  • 01:26:35
    Thank you.
• • Elliott Payne
  • 01:26:36
    I'll be demanding it.
• • Robin Wonsley
  • 01:26:38
    Thank you CAO, I did have a question regarding slide 7, the obligated reserve versus the
  • 01:26:53
    Well the list of eligible uses so right now it has a couple examples of the non-exhaustive so I want to know if there's a guideline document like we have with many of our funds of like what is fully the eligible uses for this spending and if that's like trackable anywhere or if council could receive that.
• • Justin Coles
  • 01:27:17
    Yes, through the Chair, Member Wonsley, yes, so we do have guidelines on what are the eligible expenses, predominantly is it required by the settlement agreement, and it is a one-time versus ongoing expense.
  • 01:27:31
    And we do have a list that we can provide of everything that's been approved going through that process.
• • Robin Wonsley
  • 01:27:37
    and those that have it just like a general like we again for our contingency funds all that we typically have guideline documents so just wanted to see if we could receive a copy of that and if that could be attached to a staff memo yes absolutely awesome thank you that's all the questions I had all right next I'll recognize council president Payne
• • Elliott Payne
  • 01:27:58
    Thank you, Vice President.
  • 01:28:01
    My question is actually building on some of what Councilmember Wanzi was talking about.
  • 01:28:04
    So we've got the $1.5 million set aside for ELIFA, but I'm wondering if there's any clarity around some of these budget investments that are strictly associated with the settlement agreement and at some point, you know,
  • 01:28:24
    Oakland's 20 years plus but you know hopefully we're going to be something less than that but at some point we should have we should be in a point of compliance are these investments systemic investments internally for us to maintain that compliance even after we've finished the settlement agreement or do we envision these investments
• • SPEAKER_07
  • 01:28:48
    Council.
  • 01:29:08
    I'm going to speak in a generality here.
  • 01:29:11
    A lot of the things you see in the settlement agreement we'll see in consent decrees.
  • 01:29:15
    The intention is that they are continued on past the duration of those agreements.
  • 01:29:20
    And so if you think about investments in training or policy that those continue on so that you're institutionalizing the things that were in the settlement agreement and consent decree beyond it.
  • 01:29:32
    So you're again not repeating history and winding up in the same place.
  • 01:29:35
    So that's a very general answer.
  • 01:29:37
    However, I'll caveat that with there are
  • 01:29:41
    There are certain things in here like compliance auditors, for example, that could potentially need to be shifted in the future, those types of resources.
  • 01:29:50
    But I think overall, the goal that you'll find from Department of Justice, from agencies that implement these decrees, really the goal is to institutionalize and make sure you're staying on the right track.
• • Elliott Payne
  • 01:30:04
    I think those compliance auditors are a pretty good example.
  • 01:30:07
    I'm assuming that's not an exhaustive, you know.
  • 01:30:11
    No, no, this is just an example, yes.
  • 01:30:13
    Do we, maybe this could be a follow-up of
  • 01:30:19
    and I don't know what the ratio is going to be of permanent investments for the sake of compliance versus kind of like investments for the duration of the settlement agreement but if we could get some a staff memo follow-up of a sense of that of you know we've got folks in the attorney's office we've got a lot of folks doing community engagement again that would be something I would assume we'd want to do just permanently in the future but I would just like to see what the those investments look like on which side of the ledger
  • 01:30:48
    you know, permanent versus temporary.
• • SPEAKER_07
  • 01:30:50
    And I'll also note, Council President Payne, too, the way that those compliance auditors would be working in the settlement agreement consent decree now, you could envision them doing similar, not the same work, obviously they're not working against some type of agreement, but using data analysis to determine how are we doing, and I think that's something a lot of departments continue on after consent decrees as well.
  • 01:31:12
    So just, when I say shifting how those resources look, it's
  • 01:31:17
    looks similar but not completely dissimilar.
• • Elliott Payne
  • 01:31:21
    And I would say for my staff follow-up, this doesn't need to be the definitive answer, just more of an assessment at this time, which ones do we envision being permanent investments in this institution and which ones do we see as strictly being associated with compliance for the settlement agreement.
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 01:31:43
    Is that the end of your questions, Council President?
• • Emily Koski
  • 01:31:46
    Wonderful.
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 01:31:46
    Next I'll recognize Vice Chair Koski, and she's the last person in queue as of right now, but we may have more.
• • Emily Koski
  • 01:31:54
    Thank you, Madam Chair.
  • 01:31:55
    I just have a quick question around the implementation team, then down, filtered into the compliance team, so thank you, DC Labby, I appreciate.
  • 01:32:05
    You just described saying that this team is going to grow in numbers and I see that it's going to grow in the amount of six over the next two years.
  • 01:32:14
    Do you see that growing even more beyond that?
• • SPEAKER_06
  • 01:32:20
    I can't say now, and I think we're taking a very responsible approach to building this team out.
  • 01:32:29
    We started with two people, and they're more than busy right now.
  • 01:32:33
    Next year we're going to add two more, and then by the time we get to 2026, we'll be up to six people.
  • 01:32:41
    We'll have a really good sense at that point, so I think
  • 01:32:45
    Just being responsible in how we're building this out, we're going to know more as time goes on.
  • 01:32:51
    We've used best practices from other departments that have gone through this where they say six is kind of the magic number.
  • 01:33:00
    The one thing that we're running into is more technology doesn't always mean easier.
  • 01:33:05
    It's the back end with the data practices and then with the compliance where when you get more technology, and body cameras are a great example,
  • 01:33:14
    If an incident is an hour long and you've got eight officers, that's eight hours of watching non-stop video.
  • 01:33:19
    So we're really going to have to just be cognizant as we start that process of all the compliance work we have to do of what is the magic number we need and be realistic and be responsible coming back saying six is good or you know we really do need seven or eight but we'll know more as we go along but you do have that
  • 01:33:41
    that commitment from us that we are going to keep an eye on what we truly need to bring us into compliance in doing all these audits as we move along.
• • Emily Koski
  • 01:33:51
    Okay, thank you.
  • 01:33:52
    That's helpful.
  • 01:33:52
    And so, we don't have two currently.
  • 01:33:54
    We're adding six total in the next two years.
  • 01:33:56
    Or do we have two and we're adding six, so a total of eight?
• • SPEAKER_06
  • 01:33:59
    Yeah, Vice Chair Koski, you're correct.
  • 01:34:01
    So we have two.
  • 01:34:02
    As we sit today, we have two compliance specialists in our unit right now.
  • 01:34:07
    They're actually boots on the ground doing the work.
  • 01:34:09
    2025, we'll add two more.
  • 01:34:12
    2026, we'll add two more to bring us to six at that point.
  • 01:34:16
    So two, two, and two.
• • Emily Koski
  • 01:34:17
    Okay, and I see four on here.
  • 01:34:19
    So maybe
• • SPEAKER_07
  • 01:34:22
    That is the cumulative amount between 25 and 26.
• • Emily Koski
  • 01:34:26
    Oh gotcha, okay Okay, so that's like is that what I that entire sheet we should see it show that those are cumulative amounts So there's not seven total in 2025 and not nine.
  • 01:34:39
    I guess I'm confused then maybe here I'm not looking at the chart correctly.
• • SPEAKER_07
  • 01:34:42
    So vice chair, I think you know
  • 01:34:45
    The seven total is for 2025, then there's an additional two for 2026, which is the compliance specialists.
  • 01:34:56
    So for a total of nine across both 25 and 26.
  • 01:35:00
    So nine is the the overall ongoing
• • Emily Koski
  • 01:35:04
    add.
  • 01:35:05
    Okay.
  • 01:35:06
    Two total in 2026 is over 2010.
  • 01:35:10
    Correct.
  • 01:35:10
    Got it.
  • 01:35:11
    Alright, that's just not how I read that before.
  • 01:35:13
    I thought it was a total of essentially 16 more FTEs.
  • 01:35:17
    Okay.
  • 01:35:18
    That's really helpful and I appreciate the clarity.
  • 01:35:22
    Thank you.
• • Aisha Chughtai
  • 01:35:24
    Thank you Councilmember, Vice Chair.
  • 01:35:28
    I believe we've reached the end of our questions on this presentation.
  • 01:35:33
    Thank you all for your work on this.
  • 01:35:37
    actually I will now direct the clerk to file that report and with that we've concluded all business to come before the committee today and without objection we stand adjourned until our next meeting which is tomorrow Tuesday September 10th at 10 a.m. where we are going to receive departmental budget presentations prepared by the Finance and Property Services Department, the Human Resources Department and the Assessing Department.
  • 01:36:05
    presentations for the Human Resources and Assessing Departments are in limbs for your review right now.
  • 01:36:12
    I would ask that you please review those ahead of time and if you have any questions, please pass those along to me.
  • 01:36:19
    I will be available all day today with the exception of going to the Administration Enterprise Oversight Committee.
  • 01:36:27
    and with any specific questions or clarifications you may have.
  • 01:36:33
    I will also welcome any committee members' feedback as we continue this process on whether you're receiving the information that you need out of departmental presentations.
  • 01:36:42
    And if there are adjustments or information that we need to systemically be asking for, the sooner we know that, the sooner we can have departments prepare for that information.
  • 01:36:50
    So please communicate and let
  • 01:36:54
    Stay in touch with me about what's working and what isn't for you with these presentations.
  • 01:36:58
    Thank you