Budget Committee September 30, 2024   9/30/2024

Good morning.

My name is Ayesha Chuktai and I'm the chair of the Budget Committee.

I'm going to call to order our regular meeting for Monday, September 30, 2024.

Before we begin the meeting, I want to offer a friendly reminder to all council members, staff presenters, and the public that these meetings are broadcast live to enable greater public participation.

These broadcasts include real-time captioning as a further method to increase the accessibility of our proceedings to the community.

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.

We ask all speakers to moderate the speed and clarity of their comments.

Councilmember Payne.

Present.

Wonsley?

Present.

Rainville?

Present.

Vita?

Present.

Ellison is absent.

Osman is absent.

Cashman is absent.

Jenkins is absent.

Chavez?

Present.

Chaudry is absent.

Palmisano?

Present.

Let the record reflect that we have a quorum.

Colleagues, we have just one item on our agenda today, which is a continuation of our departmental presentations.

On deck today is the Office of Public Service.

All three of the City's Deputy Chief Operations Officers are here to assist, but Deputy Chief Operations Officer Laura Melham will be doing the bulk of the presentation and will kick us off today.

My name is Laura and I serve as the Deputy City Operations Officer over Communications and Engagement for our Office of Public Service.

Thank you for the opportunity to present the Mayor's recommended budget for the Office of Public Service Administration today.

I'm here presenting on behalf of our COO, Margaret Anderson Kelleher, who is unable to be here.

and as the Chair noted, I'm joined by my fellow DCO's Sareh Garnett-Huhuli who oversees our Internal Services Branch and Brett Jelly who oversees our Development, Health, and Livability Branch.

We also have with us several of our managers, Alexander Cato, Andrew Ballard, Trudy Kenstead, and Jessica Stone.

So to provide an understanding of the role of the Office of Public Service, I wanted to start with the full org chart of the enterprise.

As you can see, the Office of Public Service is the house of essentially all of the non-public safety departments, the operational departments within the city.

Zooming in to the departments housed within OPS, we have 17 in total.

15 of those departments report up through similar business lines to the deputy city operations officers with the departments of public works and civil rights reporting directly to the COO.

On this slide you can see the personnel who are within the OPS administration budget, so that's the budget that we're discussing today.

That includes the COO, the three DCOOs, and we're also pleased to have brought on board Andrew Ballard, who joined our team earlier this year.

He is serving in a newly created position, the Enterprise Events Manager.

Andrew brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the role and is tasked with coordinating and streamlining city processes to better serve the special events that are housed here in our city.

Trudy Kenstead manages the administrative work that supports both the OPS administration office as well as a lot of the cross departmental administration needs within the larger structure of the Office of Public Service.

We also have a project management team that's led by senior project managers Alexander Cato and Jessica Stone, who manage complex, high-profile and cross-departmental projects across the city.

In their current portfolio, Alexander oversees the city's efforts for the future of George Floyd Square and Minnehaha 3000, and Jessica manages the cross-departmental efforts related to the city's climate legacy initiative.

The priority objectives of the Office of Public Service Administration are to establish and support a trusting work environment as a foundation of an anti-racist workplace, to lead and coordinate the implementation of the mayor and council's objectives to meet enterprise goals and to serve the residents of Minneapolis, and to provide executive leadership to departments to enhance service delivery, increase accountability, break down silos, and spark innovation.

Just to go over a few of our achievements.

So the Office of Public Service has been really focused on implementing the new government structure.

That includes building out the org chart that we've just looked at, setting up the reporting structure for success, and developing and recruiting for key leadership positions.

The project management team has also made progress on community engagement and development planning for George Floyd Square and Minnehaha 3000, the former third precinct building, and I thank them for their very thoughtful work on these complex initiatives.

We're pleased to have recently brought on Jessica Stone, who joins us from a previous city role.

She's going to be project managing the support for activities associated with the city's Climate Legacy Initiative to help the city reach its aggressive climate goals over the next 10 years.

And as I mentioned on the previous slide, we will begin a strategic initiative to better coordinate and support special events here in Minneapolis.

Andrew joined us earlier this year and he really hit the ground running supporting major events in our city Just to name a few the Big Ten the Olympic gymnastics trials pride And we've recently completed the three open streets events this year, which just concluded last Saturday on Nicollet Avenue So big thanks to Andrew and also to our community partners uptown Association West Broadway Association and Lindell Association who put on those events this year and

And the last thing I'll say here is that we were certainly disappointed not to have landed the Sundance Film Festival but we're so grateful to all of our partners who contributed to a very competitive and compelling case that Minneapolis is a destination for the arts and these are the kinds of opportunities that we'll continue to seek out for the city.

As I believe many departments have shared with you all in these presentations, we strive to be an employer of choice.

And in doing so, we must stay competitive to recruit and retain talented and thoughtful leaders.

And that's something that we're very focused on.

We also continue the process of implementing the new government structure, which includes change management at the executive level.

And so really, much of the executive team on a daily basis is focused on developing leadership culture, new policies, new processes, all with the goal of better serving our residents.

Here is our program and staffing summary.

So you can see that we have 11 FTEs, all of which are filled.

There is a reduction from the 2024 budget into 2025.

That includes the end of one-time funds that were slated for community engagement around George Floyd Square, as well as a reduction in internal services charges for the department.

I've spoken to the objectives and activities of the OPS administration in previous slides, so here I would like to just highlight a couple of our metrics.

Over 100 new leaders in the city have completed the metamorphosis program.

This is a six month cohort based anti-racism training for city leaders.

We've also convened 12 sessions focused on developing leadership culture with department heads.

These are efforts aimed at developing and sustaining an anti-racist leadership culture within the city enterprise.

As I mentioned previously, we contracted with three hosts to program three Open Streets events this year.

And the project management team has facilitated dozens of internal working meetings and has conducted 13 community engagement meetings to date.

To citywide surveys and that's really on top of hundreds of hours of door-knocking block walking community office hours and other time spent in community related to these projects Here's a little more on our goals for the program management work We're creating opportunities to collaborate across departments to achieve the best outcomes for each project We strive to center equity and deliver effective community engagement and communication and we strive to stay on budget and meet timelines

The Office of Public Service Administration has one new budget request this year, an ongoing request of $30,000 for departmental capacity building.

As I discussed in the achievements section, this office has been focused on implementing the organizational structure of the new government and developing and recruiting for leadership positions.

So we've grown the number of staff in the department without adding any non-personnel funds to support that growth.

Our current budget does not provide for staff development such as professional memberships and trainings.

In the past salary savings has helped to cover these expenses but that is unsustainable especially now that we are fully staffed.

These capacity building funds would also ensure that we have resources to continue workplace culture initiatives and support community engagement efforts for cross-departmental projects since one-time funding for those things is falling off These activities I've described would be supported by the funding request and are directly tied to our goals of remaining an employer of choice developing and sustaining an anti-racist workplace environment and best serving the residents of Minneapolis

So again, this new spending we are requesting is departmental capacity building for professional development and engagement and That concludes my presentation chair.

Thank you for that presentation, Deputy COO.

I'll remind colleagues that we will be using speaker management today, so please make sure you are signed in.

Are there any questions or comments from members of the committee?

Thank you Chair Chuck Tyne, thank you so much for the presentation.

I see one of the priority objectives says that it's to establish and support a trusting work environment as a foundation of an anti-racist workplace.

I'm glad that is one of the objectives of the office and wondering if you can point to us in the budget any recommendations, any programs, anything that is meant to support subjective and what the office is going to be doing to address

Thanks for the question.

Absolutely, this has been a priority for the Office of Public Service and the executive leaders across the new government.

There has been a lot of investment in training programs that includes the metamorphosis training that has trained over 100 city leaders.

This is a six-month cohort-based program that is focused on training around structural racism and then teaching

that can lead to an anti-racist workplace.

That work is also being developed internally within the HR department to have more capacity, to expand that capacity to bring that to other city employees.

So I point to that in the budget for HR.

We also are in a parallel work environment.

We are engaging with departmental staff.

So I mentioned there were 12 sessions with departmental leaders.

This is really based on at the leadership level, again developing that kind of workplace culture and leadership culture that we're looking for.

I will note that we've been joined in this committee meeting by Councilmember Ellison.

Thank you Madam Vice President and thank you so much Deputy COO for the presentation.

I appreciate you being able to step in

for the COO too.

It takes a team, so I appreciate that.

I just have a quick question.

There are a couple of factors that are driving the increase in salaries.

One is that the Senior Project Manager for the Climate Legacy Initiative was only partially budgeted in 24 because we didn't anticipate hiring that position until mid-year.

So that position is fully funded in 25.

Okay, great.

That's really helpful so just to clarify the in the role the climate and equity initiative so that was partially

Sure, Chair Chigte, Vice Chair Koski, I might also call colleagues up if I don't answer it fully, but my understanding is that the position, we knew we weren't going to be hiring for it until mid-year because it was being developed, and so we only budgeted for a portion of the year for that position.

Thank you.

I am not seeing any other members in queue.

So I'll ask one more time if there are any further questions for the deputy COO related to this presentation.

And with that, we have completed discussion and questions related to your presentation.

Deputy COO, Melham, thank you.

seeing no further discussion I will direct the clerk to file that presentation and with that we've concluded all business to come before the committee today and without

And without objection we stand adjourned until Monday October 7th at 10 a.m. Where we will receive departmental presentations from the city attorney's office The mayor's office and the legislative department which includes the office of city clerk and office of city auditor None of those presentations are available in limbs yet, but please keep an eye out as we get closer to October 7th.