Budget Committee September 14, 2026   9/14/2026

Good morning.

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

I'm going to call to order our adjourned meeting for this morning, September 14th.

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.

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.

Council Member Payne?

Present.

Wonsley is absent.

Rainville is absent.

Osment is absent.

Stevenson?

Present.

Chavez?

Present.

Whiting is absent.

Chowdhury?

I'll also remind my colleagues that we're using speaker management today so please make sure to sign in.

The clerks are available for assistance in case you are having any trouble.

The agenda for today is before us.

Today we have three presentations.

The first is we're going to make a slight adjustment to the agenda as it's posted.

We'll begin with the biannual personnel report, which is listed as the third item on your agenda.

I'll also note that we've been joined in this meeting by Vice President Osman.

So we'll begin with the biannual personnel report.

For this, I will invite Deb Krueger, the Director of Human Resources Operations, to present this item.

Good morning.

Good morning Chair, members of the Budget Committee, again Deb Krueger, Director of Operations.

It's my pleasure this morning to present to you the biannual personnel report.

Sure.

In support of the Budget Committee's annual work plan.

It is prepared and presented by the Human Resources Department and the Finance Department cooperatively.

And we'll be providing a summary of things like the approved council approved budgeted workforce FTEs, which includes both permanent positions, seasonal, as well as, excuse me,

Status of positions, whether FTE positions are filled.

they're vacant, and then when there are vacancies, we will talk a little bit about the length of the vacancy, the departments that they're in, the status of hiring for those vacant positions, personnel expenses, including the annual 2020, fiscal year 2026 personnel budget, as well as overtime expenses for 2020 through July of 2026, and some personnel administrative actions

including transfers of personnel from one department to another as well as approved administrative FTE ads as per Financial Policy 153.

And then just to give you a sense of the data that we'll be sharing, it was pulled and is effective as of September 4th, so it's about 10 days dated.

So let's start with a summary of the city's workforce.

Again, as of September 4th, there were approximately 4600 FTEs working at the city.

That includes budgeted, unbudgeted, and temporary employees.

So a total of 4603.78.

Of those 4600 employees,

Just shy of 4300, 4292.13 were the council approved and budgeted FTEs during the budget approval process for 2026, fiscal year 2026.

That number does exclude any capital funded positions and FTEs.

and temporary and short-term grant-funded positions.

We will talk a little bit about temporary and those short-term grant-funded positions.

They're captured in the additional active FTEs, which is the next bullet point, roughly 311 additional active FTEs above and beyond the budgeted and council-approved FTE number.

Approximately 98% of our FTEs are full-time.

Where we do have part-time employees, they generally are of an intermittent nature, like at the convention center and their exhibit staff.

The roughly 4300 city council approved and budgeted FTEs are embedded within the 28 city departments that range in size from 1058 in the public works department, which has the highest FTE count, down to six that are both in arts and cultural affairs as well as intergovernmental relations and everything in between.

And you, in LIMS there was also provided the full personnel report which includes each department and the number of positions that they have approved in their budget.

So we were talking about the 4200, almost 4300 FTEs in the fiscal year 2026 approved budget.

about 91.6% of those positions are filled as of September 4th.

Roughly 3,900 of those FTEs.

Four city departments are fully staffed.

Many have one vacancy in hiring recruitment process, but about 91.6%, which is that percent is roughly similar and the same as it was in September

So we've actually remained fairly stable and that's just pretty much normal attrition for the city.

And while there, as we just talked about on the last slide, while there are

4,292 approved FTEs.

Again, the total number of employees working at the city is 4,600.

And so there are 311 that aren't in that, like in the budget book, right, for the fiscal year 2026 budget.

Of those 311, 145 are sort of over allocation of non-temporary FTEs.

that can include for a variety of reasons.

That can include things like what we call bill curve staffing.

There are a few departments that are allowed to overfill the number of budgeted positions they have due to high turnover and long hiring training processes like a 911 for their telecommunicators.

And there are a few other departments, animal control officers and reg services.

So there are very few of those positions, but there are a few overfills currently.

as well as some public safety aided positions, which technically they're budgeted, they're just not in the approved FTE count, as well as some short term grant funded positions and or one time funded positions.

So while there is budget, they're just not part of that approved ongoing FTE count.

There are also, and the majority of these 145 filled positions that are sort of on a permanent basis and yet they're, so they're non-temporary, but they're not part of the approved, council approved budgeted positions are trainees, apprentice, individuals that are in Pathways programs where we hire them as a trainee, we give them the schooling, the skills necessary to then be promoted up into the full job title.

and then we also had a few approved administrative ads that are funded through capital or existing non-personnel budget.

And then the remainder of that 311 sort of over-budgeted, non-approved FTE count, we do have 160

six temporary employees.

While this slide shows 2066, we sort of include the election judges off to the side.

Right now we've got a number of them on with the upcoming elections.

There's 1,800 election judges, and then there are 166 other temporary employees, including 66 FTEs that are seasonal workers, again, largely in election, but we also have some doing the summer environmental inspections work in the health department.

31 interns, most of them are getting ready to roll off the summer internship schedule.

Almost 24 FTEs that are temporary employees.

They're hired due to a vacancy and so we'll bring in a temporary employee until that vacancy can be filled or sometimes for a special project.

and then 44 FTEs are outside trades.

So they are, excuse me, staff that are hired through a union hall.

Generally speaking skilled staff, generally speaking used for construction projects to supplement the city's staff, carpenters, welders, truck operators, truck drivers and they will usually stay on board until about mid November when the construction season ends and then they'll be off boarded.

12 city departments employing temporary employees at this time.

And their employments can range anywhere from a couple of days, like for construction, they might need a splicer.

They come in, they work for three, four days, and then they're off.

To anywhere up to a year.

about 71% of these 166 temps really are seasonal.

Therefore, the construction projects, the summer interns, the election support, they tend not to be sort of an ongoing special need, fill a vacancy type of role.

And then independent contractors are not reported as they're not in our HR system.

Vacancies.

About 8.4% of our positions are vacant currently, about 360.35 FTEs.

Again, similar vacancy rate as September of 2025.

which is not an unusual vacancy rate for local government industry.

The standard tends to be 5 to 10% is pretty typical vacancy rates for an acceptable range and considered normal attrition for local government.

Can spike up as high as 15%.

for more common factors like law enforcement, public health, and civil engineering functions.

And you will see, for instance, up to 15% is not unusual for law enforcement.

And we are at 11.3% of our vacancy rate in police, which I'll talk about in a second.

So we're right in the middle of the road in terms of normal, standard, acceptable vacancies and attrition.

The departments with the highest vacancies

Police of their 969 budgeted positions, about 109 are vacant at this time, which is 11.3% of their workforce total.

That is down from 13% a year ago in September of 2025.

Public Works, they have about 91.

FTE positions vacant, which is about 8.7% of their overall workforce number, down about a little less than a percent from 2025.

So they've been actually fairly stable in terms of their vacancies.

And then the convention center, 30, almost 31 vacant positions, about 18.8% of their overall workforce.

That is down, the vacancy rate is down 3.6 from September of 2025.

The highest vacancies in these departments also though are typically, they tend to stay fairly high as they have a lot of seasonal hires.

You know, in the public works department, a lot of their vacancies are in the service worker.

area function, you know, road crews.

And so they will typically then, over the winter season, they staff for the winter season and then they supplement their workforce for the construction season.

So they'll start their hiring process, they wait and they hold their vacancies.

Generally speaking, until about March, now 2027, will they hire big, large classes to supplement these vacancies.

And then at the Convention Center, again, they're very event,

based driven hires.

So depending on their event load, they will hire more staff.

hiring length of vacancies.

About 40% of the 360 vacancies have been vacant for six months or less.

Almost 30% have been vacant for three months or less.

So there are the relatively new vacancies due to just normal attrition.

32% have been vacant 12 months or longer.

There's about 130 of those and again about 72%

percent of those longer vacant positions are either due to sworn police, a lot of sergeants, sergeant positions, but again, those seasonally hired positions, they sort of intentionally hold them until sort of the season to hire and the workload needs increases.

The status of those 100 and 360 vacant positions, about 17% of them are in active hiring processes right now, meaning we're accepting applications, we're going through the exam process, we're making job offers.

And about 23% of them are upcoming recruitments planned, either known seasonal hires or their very recent hires that were just in vacancy review approval as well as job posting development.

and currently there are 92 sworn vacancies.

Many of them are in the sergeant class and I know that they are waiting for their officer strengths to come up to be able to promote more more sergeants.

The personnel administrative actions, administratively added FTEs.

As you may know, they've come through the budget office.

There have been 19 FTEs added administratively to a department's budget through Q2 of 2026, where generally speaking, they've either been funded through capital funds

or through the department transferring of department non-personnel budget to their personnel budget and the budgetary impact for that has been about 1.2 million and when I say impact that doesn't mean new funding it just means transferring dollars generally from from non-personnel to personnel.

and then there have been 13 council approved transfers of positions from one department to another and that those came across during the, generally through the budget markup for the 2026 budget.

Although nine FTEs were transferred from the communications department from embedded communications staffs in other departments to really consolidate that communication related function and then the four FTE transfers aligned with the 2026

adoption of the 2026 budget.

So we come down to personnel expenses.

In 2026, the City Council approved personnel budget was $654 million.

$385 million has been spent on personnel through July of 2026, which is about 59% of the overall annual budget for fiscal year 2026.

So at the end of July, about 41% of actual personnel budget remained for 2026 to be spent, but with 42% of the year remaining.

For those of you who can do math much better than I can, we're about 1% over budget in personnel.

And the personnel budget we're talking about here is strictly salary and fringe.

I think that 1% over budget generally is influenced by a number of factors.

New hires are budgeted at the lowest salary step and many times you know you're hiring somewhere above sort of that minimum starting salary and so that budgetary dollar does not catch up.

The department sort of eats the extra costs or if you have to hire somebody at for instance a step three instead of a step one.

Also health care plan changes throughout the year.

as individuals move from single coverage to family coverage and that's more expensive.

And then there have been some reclassifications as well that have impacted that.

And then in terms of overtime expenses, 7.2 million budgeted in fiscal year 2026 and 19.1 million spent through July of 2026.

the large overages again, as you know, largely for public safety departments, larger spend than budgeted for 9-1-1 fire, police.

Thank you for that presentation, Director Krueger.

I'll ask my colleagues if there are any questions or discussion related to this presentation.

Thank you.

Thank you for this presentation.

I just want to ground myself.

There's a lot of numbers and information here as to how I and maybe my colleagues should look to view these slides.

So the mayor is proposing cuts to many of these vacant positions.

Is that accounted for here?

Or what you're showing us is absent the mayor's proposal.

Through the Chair, Councilmember Palmisano, it is just a state of the workforce.

So, thank you.

I know final decisions on these things are up to department directors, but how do we know which of these are proposed to be eliminated already?

through the chair, Councilmember Palmisano.

It is not indicated in the report, those that have been sort of earmarked.

And again, departments, in some areas, departments are making their decisions and they have not been fully communicated yet by the departments as they're working through the positions that may be impacted.

But for those that are known, they can certainly, we can follow up and certainly

So maybe wait for the each department by department presentation for that.

I'm getting nods from the budget team.

So because the city is in a constant phase of hiring, in general

And I imagine these were all slated probably to be cut but would it be best to look at positions that have been vacant for More than six months if we are looking for a true vacant position Usually because you know my colleagues often try to reappropriate vacant positions for other things I'm sure

If my colleagues are looking to repurpose vacant positions, is it fair to say generally if they're vacant for more than six months, they're really a vacancy?

Through the Chair, Council Member Palmesano, I wouldn't make a blanket statement that anything over six months is a position that is less non-essential.

Again, about 70% of those longer held positions, even over 12 months, are the seasonal hired types of positions in public works.

They'll do their large hiring in March.

So I would think

it would be more appropriate perhaps for each department to talk about their vacancies during the budget presentations and talk about any of those longer held positions.

Some of them I know are in reclassification processes, especially those between like a six and 12 month vacancy length.

They have plans, they've just

Yeah, thank you.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for this report.

Can you speak a little bit to the 19 admin added FTEs in 2026 from departmental non-personnel budget?

Can you speak to where a department head might

add an FTE or would that be from maybe a contractual services line that has been staying elevated for a while?

Through the Chair, Councilmember Schaffer, and I do have the budget office here who, you know, they get approved first through the CFO before they come to the Budget Committee.

I think, generally speaking, where I was seen in Q1 and Q2, the administrative ads is for things like the need for additional capital-funded positions.

In the Health Department, for instance, there were a number of

administrative ads there and it's due to new grant funding, emergency management which had a bit of an upheaval earlier this year in terms of you know their funding and and the need to be able to bolster those numbers.

Okay, so capital funded positions are typically what that 19 number, how they're funded from, from additional grants or other sources of money that would be coming in.

Okay, and then once they are fully added as an FTE, is there a process, say the grant goes for two years, what's the process for reevaluating whether that FTE stays or goes?

Through the Chair, Councilmember Schaffer, that's really the department.

I mean, at that point, when they were an administrative ad, now going into 2027, they would be part of the base budget, just like any other position in a department.

And if their needs change, if grants change, whether they're

short term like three year grants or whether they're sort of those, the additional need for longer term grants that we've had for decades.

Okay, so they kind of make the decision once the grant funding is ending.

Do we keep this position?

Do we say go away?

Okay, thank you.

That's really helpful.

Through the Chair, Council Member Schaefer, yes they are.

They're stipend.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I mean, they do have a salary schedule as well.

Yeah.

So are they included in the average as well?

Good morning, Chair Chuck Tye, members of the Budget Committee.

My name is Justin Carlson.

I'm the Budget Manager in the Finance and Property Services Department.

No, I would have to look it up, but I just remember if it was in the budget book or whatever.

I just was something that came to mind when you guys were giving this presentation.

Okay, thank you.

So that clarified that full-time FTEs are what we look at with the levy.

Yeah, if there's a number coming from the budget division, it's going to be just permanent budget positions, not temporary.

Thank you so much.

And then my final question is, I really appreciate that each department number that is approved is listed in LIMS, and I'll take a look at that.

through the chair, council member, Schaefer.

Certainly, you can get a workforce roster historically from 2020.

That would be great.

Pivot by departments.

Thank you so much, that's it.

Since 2020.

Awesome, thank you.

I put myself in queue here, just wanted to uplift a couple things I've heard during discussion.

The first being that we have a list of vacancies that we understood from this report that ultimately more information about that lives at the department level.

As we get into departmental presentations over the next couple months, the lining up of vacancies to individual department budgets is something we want to see and is a part of the budget templates that are going to departments as part of their presentation schedule.

So wanted to note that the other piece to note here is that we did receive a

An administrative FTE ad

presentation earlier this summer.

And as we are looking at vacancies and department level FTEs, those administrative ads are certainly a piece of the puzzle.

I want to thank you, Ms. Krueger, for your presentation.

I don't see any further questions.

So I will direct the clerk to file that report.

All right.

Now we are going to move to the next two presentations, which are the 2026 Council Dedicated Funds along with 2026 Change Items.

For these items, I will welcome Deputy City Operations Officer Brett Gelli to begin these presentations.

Good morning, Chair Chuktai and committee members.

My name is Brett Jelly.

I'm the Deputy City Operations Officer for Development Health and Livability.

I'm here this morning with representatives from city departments to provide an update on two types of budget amendments from the 2026 budget.

The first presentation is entitled Council Dedicated Funds and reflects 13 budget amendments labeled that way in the budget book.

These amendments are also known as earmarks as they dedicate a portion of a departmental budget to a specific purpose.

The financial policy, the city's adopted financial policy requires a written report to the City Council by April 30th and August 31st each year on the administration's plan for spending council dedicated funds.

This presentation is a follow up to the August 31st written report.

I'm also going to introduce the second presentation as it's very similar.

That one is entitled Additional Spending Update and reflects 38 items labeled that way in the budget book.

So that's one clarification.

If you go through the 2026 adopted budget book, there are items noted as council dedicated funds and then there are items noted as additional spending.

These changes in this presentation include both mayoral proposals that were adopted by the City Council and council amendments.

One thing I want to note moving forward is this reporting will look different assuming the policy is the same next year.

Those future written reports will include both the council dedicated fund portion of today's presentation and any council amendments included that are in the additional spending presentation.

As we've implemented this policy in 2026, we've determined that both categories in the budget book should be categorized as council-dedicated funds.

As such, the financial policy will apply to both those types of amendments.

A couple of run-and-show things, so this concludes my portion of the introduction.

If there are any questions about kind of the overall process,

I'm happy to take them right now.

We will move to having departmental reps come up and give brief updates on their items.

Feel free to ask specific questions at that time, and we'll just run through them.

Anne, check in the room.

Excellent.

Thank you.

So we'll first take questions on overview and the introduction that Mr. Jelly just covered.

Are there any questions about generally what we're going to see in these two presentations?

I'm not seeing any.

You can continue.

Good morning, Council members.

My name is Heidi Ritchie.

I'm the Interim Commissioner of Health for the City of Minneapolis and we have two items of the South Minneapolis Underserved Communities Opioid Response.

That's $150,000 out of our opioid settlement to go towards services in South Minneapolis

We have provided training to partners on the implementation of our long-acting buprenorphine treatment, otherwise known as Bruxati.

So we have cohorts out there that are being trained.

We brought in the California Bridge to help with protocols and implementation in other sites around the city.

So that's what we've been doing with that funding.

And then we have the Autism and Water Safety Public Health Program.

That was a $25,000 earmark.

and that funding has been contracted and the work has started.

Wonderful.

Thank you, Ms. Ritchie.

Thank you, Commissioner.

Appreciate you coming and providing those updates.

Can you go more about the water safety with St. Davis?

Are they doing in community of their programs?

Are they going out there and doing it or are they doing onsite?

What is the

How would they reach out?

I met with them.

I met their leaders.

Through the Chair, our Council Vice President Osman, I don't know exactly how they are delivering their services.

I think they're doing it the same as they do, so it's kind of like a family home visiting type thing, but then also they get kids into the pool.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

Clerks, if we can note that for administrative follow-up.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Ritchie.

We'll continue to the next.

Oh, I see, if you feel, just come right back.

I just have a question.

I see it's South Minneapolis, underserved communities, opioid response.

Is there work around the opioid response being done in North Minneapolis, too?

Through the Chair, Councilmember Warren, this is a specific targeted program, but we are doing work in North Minneapolis, in particular the cohort that I mentioned in South Minneapolis.

Okay.

So, I knew that there were, when I seen a listing of organizations that were funded around opioid response, I knew that there were some North Minneapolis organizations that were working in partnership with that, but I didn't see anything specifically listed here.

So, okay.

Yes, thank you, Chair, members of the committee, Tim Sexton, Public Works Director.

We had three items to mention today, the first being the zero waste project manager.

This was a position that should be posted at any time now, so we've been moving forward with it.

We did have a funding change sort of mid-year that would allow us to better meet the goals of the position, which was to advance the zero waste

plan that we have as a city.

By shifting the funding, we're able to focus on commercial and multifamily residential versus instead of only single family and small multifamily residential properties.

So that's the reason for that delay, but it is moving forward.

The second item is the zero waste work group.

This was

connected to the zero waste project manager position.

This one, the clerk's office has been working to figure out kind of how to fit this into the current tier four advisory board structure rather than creating a brand new

Board or commission that would have to go be staffed and other things.

There's existing work that's happening through the appointed boards and commissions process.

The idea was to wrap this one in.

That one, as far as I know, is still moving forward, but that is with the clerk's office right now.

And finally, the sidewalk plowing pilot.

So this is a pilot.

I think it's his third year that's working on sidewalks, snow, and ice throughout neighborhoods around the city.

So, appropriated at $595,000 per year spent to date, actually this is a Q3 report, $192,000, but as of September 1st, we'd spent approximately $299,000.

So, what's notable about this is because this is focused on snow and ice.

It's a little bit, it can be difficult to budget because our winter is at the beginning of the calendar year and then again at the very end.

Obviously snow is out of our control, but we are right about the 50% spending mark, so I think that, yeah, I think that's where we'd want to be given what we know.

With that, I think that's it for me.

Are there any questions for Director Sexton?

I'm surprised by that.

Thank you very much.

Now we're gonna continue to the Office of Community Safety.

Good morning Chair Schugte, Vice Chair Schaefer, Budget Committee members.

I am Jared Jeffries.

I am the Deputy Commissioner of Community Safety.

I will provide updates on the Police Department items from this year, though I will note my colleague Commander Chris Brown is also in the audience available for questions.

specific to MPD as well.

The first item is the police department off-duty fees.

I won't read verbatim everything that's on the screen, but this is consistent with what the updates have been this year and what we have said previously.

For us to implement an off-duty fee structure, we need to build the underlying systems to be able to actually collect the fee.

that work is in process, specifically moving the police department along with every other department that's using it off of workforce director and onto a new scheduling and time management system known as UKG.

So I'm calling that out specifically because once that occurs, we're able to layer on additional technology solutions that will enable us to logistically collect and administer a fee.

Happy to take questions on that one.

And then just very quickly, I won't spend a bunch of time on this one as I know legislative updates have been coming through PHSC and other places for the non-fatal shooting task force.

The funding that was allocated as part of that item is being fully implemented, staffing out what's known as the FAST team or Firearms Assault Shoot Team that covers non-fatal shootings.

and the department has successfully been administering that since the beginning of this year and the program has been proven to be very effective.

Thank you, Chair Chigtai.

Can you specify what you mean by have not found resources?

You're referencing the last sentence on the slide, Council President.

Through the Chair, Council President, the resources to actually implement the program, so that is the corresponding policy piece, specifically where I'll say the administration of such a fee schedule would actually live.

So for example, police department, finance, different department.

This is a new function for the city as far as implementing collecting this type of fee.

I believe so, Council President.

Part of the challenge right now with where we are with the systems implementation is there's the underlying time management.

scheduling system that I referenced, we need to add on.

We don't believe that scheduling time management solution by itself will be able to offer us the functionality for actually collecting a fee that we need, so we'll need to layer on

an additional technology solution.

We'll need to I'll say in parallel paths build out that and the programmatic bones of how the actual fee collection would work.

Does that make sense Council President?

It doesn't but I think maybe we need to just have a further conversation because like this body provides resources to achieve goals.

Our goal is to have

Thank you, Chair.

Can you go into some more detail about non-fatal shootings?

Yes, through the chair, Council Member Warren, I may invite Commander Brown to speak to this a little bit more if I don't sufficiently answer your question.

But right now, MPD Investigations has, I'll say, bifurcated its investigators through homicide.

So obviously, when there's a fatality, they cover that piece.

So any other type of shooting,

that does not result in a fatality, FAST or Non-Fail Shoot Team will pick that up.

Well, we got to statistically investigate both because complications of a gunshot wound could result in somebody dying a year later.

So a fatality is a fatality is, it is, you know, they're because of the complexity and unique makeup of the human body.

any bullet that enters the body in any fashion could result in a fatality so I think this truly is a waste if you're asking my time and that you know individuals should be working very diligently with our county attorney to deeply investigate all gunshot injuries or what have you there's not a specific task force that needs to be assigned it all individuals should be assigned to it period so I mean

Good idea, but that's the wrong try.

I mean, I think that we really have to dig deeper into the meat and potatoes of what is really causing the gun violence that is happening out on the streets.

Because all of it could end in fatality, you know?

someone could get shot in the leg.

Unfortunately we had an officer shot in the leg that could have ended up in a fatality because why?

There's an aorta that lives inside of your leg that runs through the body so we don't know what the long-term complications there it's it needs to be treated

and every situation as you know an attempted murder incident that it you know grotesquely like I don't understand why there's a separate task force that is you know combing through what they feel is non-fatal when they're all a fatality when someone is you know body is intruded with the bullets so I don't know but thank you for that the end.

Thank you, Chair.

I did want to add a little context on the non-fatal shooting task force.

I do think it is something that is really important that is saving people's lives.

It is doing work that did not happen before, and that is important to acknowledge because without doing this work before, which means that there were investigations that were either not happening or not being thoroughly done, which means that there were going to be more victims of gun violence in our city, which would be unacceptable.

I think the bigger question we need to have is okay great we're investigating fatal shootings now we're digging deeper into non-fatal shootings and something I've heard from my neighbors and constituents is what are we doing to investigate shootings that may have not shot somebody if somebody may have not shot somebody how are we better investigating just shootings in general whether it's non-fatal or fatal just shootings in general so I just want to add that context I think that that does matter this work is important and it is saving people's lives

So now that I added that context, I want to talk about the police department off-duty fees, which is where my concerns are at.

As I said in the last budget meeting, MPD is overspending already its budget.

It is leading to massive cuts into basic city services, including our neighborhood safety department when it comes to violence interrupters, violence prevention services, services that we need to do and keep to keep people safe in our city.

Now, residents continue to subsidize

off duty programs for MPD, side gigs for MPD, which is leading to further cuts into basic city services.

So my concerns are that without implementing and collecting these fees, it's going to only further

put us deeper in a hole in the city budget and is only going to further cuts to city programs and more layoffs to city staff.

So I will continue to say that without implementing these off-duty fees, one, it's unacceptable and it's going to lead to more further layoffs in our city, which is not a good thing.

Thank you.

Questions on the off-duty fees, see if I can get a little more clarity on the numbers.

Chair Chagatai, Vice Chair Schaefer, I believe I'd have to look back at the legislative record.

The 329,000 may have been, I can't remember if it was designed, if it was specified for software or for staff, or if it had a specific purpose.

I think the, if I recall, the intent would have been to dedicate staff to implementation.

So to answer your question, I'll hypothetically say if we had UKGE, the underlying system, prepared to go at the beginning of 2026 and MPD shifted over, that is what that funding would have been used for.

Well, you said 2026.

In the hypothetical I presented, if the system was prepared, if UKG was prepared, that's what it would have been used for.

Thank you, that's really helpful so that that funding is still sitting as is, you're able to do this first step with Workforce.

Vice Chair Schaffer, we've been evaluating throughout the transition whether or not the new scheduling software could accomplish this.

We believe that it will not be able to accomplish everything, so we anticipate there will be additional costs, but we won't know the full scale of that until a gaps in assets analysis, what UKG can do versus what it can't, and then for what it can't do,

Great.

Thank you.

That's helpful.

Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I just want to go back and clarify my understanding of the traffic safety for all line item in public works, actually.

I see it was on slide 17 that it says traffic safety for all $5.5 million all spent for traffic calming.

well actually I think it said it was understood to build all traffic installations.

We'll come back to it.

Thank you.

I think that's all the questions we've got for you, Mr. Jefferies.

Good morning.

Amanda Harrington, Director of the Neighborhood Safety Department.

The Neighborhood Safety Department was provided with $100,000 for safety initiatives in the Stevens Square neighborhood.

have had services in that community.

The contract began December 31st, 2025 and continues today.

We're currently using the $100,000 council dedicated funds for a work order specifically for Stevens Square.

The first half of the year was splitting a team between Stevens Square neighborhood and Loring Park neighborhood.

Those services will continue until the end of 2026.

Thank you, Director Harrington.

Are there any questions related to this neighborhood safety item?

Not seeing any.

Thank you, Director.

Good morning members of the Council.

My name is Erik Hansen.

I'm the Director of Community Planning and Economic Development and I'll give you an update on five items from the 2026 budget.

The first is the public housing tenant organizing.

We are contracting with those funds and should have those fully expended by the end of this year.

Tiny Homes and Big Dreams is something that we were working on with through our planning and housing staff working together on that one.

We actually have, outside consultant, we've signed a contract with them for the $15,000 that you've directed with us.

I think last Friday.

So that would be moving.

Emergency operation funding, shelter funding, those contracts are in place and we fully expect to expend that fund by the end of this year.

Commercial Adaptive Reuse Study and the Invest in Child Care Workers.

We talked about this the last time.

These are two items that we're taking alternatives approaches to.

The commercial adaptive reuse study, in lieu of engaging a consultant to tell us about how

to reduce barriers to commercial investments in buildings.

We're actually putting together a strategy around economic activation in downtown and uptown.

We have detailed staff to work on this project.

We are working with the mayor's office around comprehensive strategy that will help with accelerating it.

We have been learning from other cities that have done

Adaptive Reuse studies and being able to apply those things within the city's market as well as talking directly to brokers in town, real estate developers, property owners, tenants, and that sort of thing to learn about what is happening in the real market and what is affecting Minneapolis and how Minneapolis compares and contrasts with other markets within the community.

The mayor is planning to announce a number of initiatives at the end of next month.

And in Invest in Child Care Workers, we have not hired FTE as directed, but we are staffing it with our employment and training.

We have a career pathways program, as you know, that

addresses child care employment and we have staff within our employment and training group that is working on it.

That funding, both those funds, the 125 and the 102 are kind of locked in the budget.

They're not necessarily things that we're using for these uses.

Based on the city's financial policy, we would have to come back to the council and ask for those to be

redirected into other uses right now.

They're just kind of held.

So none of the 125 or the 102 have been expended.

We're just trying to meet the objective of the City Council using other resources.

Thank you.

I'll see if there are any questions for Director Hansen.

Could you speak a little bit to just some of the comments you just made?

You're moving forward the intent of the council without necessarily spending the funding.

Can you speak to a little bit what happens then if the intent is fulfilled but the funding is not used?

Chair Chigtai, Vice Chair Schaefer, as I understand it, and we did some learning the last time we had this conversation about the new financial policies that are in place in the city, is when the council directs this funding that's locked into that specific use.

in order for the department to access those two funding sources, the 125 and 102, I would have to come back to the council and ask for you to move that somewhere.

So it's effectively a cut to the city, to CPED's general budget.

It is sequestered for those two uses.

We discussed with the council during the markup in this budget about the commercial reuse study and this other item.

that we could get there some other ways.

There's the will of the body.

We're still going to get there.

We don't want to use the money for something we don't think is going to have the same kind of return, and we still understand what the intent was of the council, which is reactivating commercial buildings and seeing how we can have a career pathways program in child care.

We think we're getting to that, and then we'd have to come back and talk to you about

But right now I don't have authority to move that into like clearing up The bottom, you know the bottom line of the budget for 2026.

Thank you for that clarification Then as we approach the 2027 budget if there's changes that the department would like to make to those two specific ones Well, we'll consider those as part of the budget process

I'm not seeing any further questions.

Thank you.

So that marks the end of the earmarks presentation.

We'll welcome back Deputy COO Jelly to introduce the second part of this presentation and welcome up the relevant staff to provide us some further details.

Thank you, Chair Chuktai, committee members.

I am back to very short, so my earlier introduction covered much of this.

Just one additional note or point of emphasis that this presentation includes both items that were new proposals.

from the mayor as part of the budget process that the council adopted, as well as items that the council amended through the amendment process.

And again, if you look through the budget book and you see items labeled as additional spending, that is what is captured in this presentation.

Director Johnson had a conflict today, so I'm going to cover the first item.

This is was a $300,000 appropriation for art preservation in George Floyd Square.

As you can see in the note as an update, the plan projected spending for 2026 is 50 to $60,000.

Thank you.

Are there any questions on this?

Thank you.

I just wanted to ask a little bit more about this.

So $300,000 was set aside, $50,000 to $60,000.

Okay.

So we certainly, through the chair, Council Member Stevenson, we certainly expect to have some art preservation expenses in 2027.

A budget like this, our first preference would be to go through the rollover process as we qualify for that process.

If that isn't available, we will work, we have a very large George Floyd Square team and we will look at

Okay, so I guess this work is the outside contractors that you have who are preserving or moving art and artifacts in George White Square?

Through the Chair, Council Member Sieves and that is correct.

Okay, so you anticipate you'd be able to find that specific money somewhere?

because rollover, it goes straight to the police.

We all know that.

So the money's not coming back.

Okay, okay.

So there's no intention of

With this money, the remaining $250,000, $240,000, there was no intention to use that in any other way.

It was exclusively for preservation of art.

Chair checked, Council Member Steeves, and that is correct.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you.

I'm not seeing anyone else in queue, so we're ready to continue to the next department.

Not civil rights.

Director will just welcome you.

Looks like the slide deck has been changed.

Do you want to go through this?

Go right ahead.

Perfect.

We're starting with C-Ped.

I'm back.

You're already up here.

Erik Hansen, C-Ped Director.

You'll see a lot of change items on this one.

C-Ped has a number of programs that are annual, but you appropriate money on a yearly basis.

And so they're ongoing programs, and so we'll get to the end of it.

and this also encapsulates some of the changes that the mayor will make with his budget.

The first item on this is 30th Street Thrive implementation.

You see an update for we're doing some work with Twin Cities Land Trust about one of the components of it.

There's a legislative directive that CPET is working on to give a full update that is due by the end of this month.

That's when we'll be able to give you a full complement of activities that are going on

with respect to 38 Thrive.

A number of these economic development programs were delayed in implementation in the year for two reasons.

One, Operation MetroSurge, setting up the resiliency fund and tenant supports that came out of Operation MetroSurge and resourcing that.

and then we had a slight pause on spending money and hiring people from the mayor as he was deliberating his budget and those next two components on this table, the economic development and cultural activation grants and the grocery store activation, those two were held.

We got a directive to hold those two until the budget was

announced.

As you know, the budget has been announced.

We are now evaluating how to then move forward with respect to what's in our budget and how to activate these things.

So we'll be putting staff towards these next two items.

The final one on this chart is emergency housing vouchers.

We have those contracted with MPHA.

and the program startup is underway.

As you remember, this is the first year, there's some startup money, and then we would have emergency housing voucher funding for folks going through the year.

Again, another $1 million in that same housing voucher program is being contracted with

with MPHA.

The next one on our list is nighttime business license inspectors.

Those positions are being evaluated with respect to the reduction in force that the mayor has put in his budget.

We're in a hiring process.

We got that put on a freeze.

We did not make hiring decisions based on that.

keep those positions open, and we'll be discussing those more fully in the context of reduction in force for CPEDS.

Right now, the estimate is seven full-time employee equivalents that would be reduced in CPEDS, and this could factor into it.

Street Vendor Grant and Compliance Program.

For those who are wondering what that is, it's to help with unlicensed food vendors become compliant with our food regulations.

That was a program that was in the Health Department that had moved over to CPED.

We are developing a notice of funding availability to get an operator that could provide the programming dollars.

The health department operated a program with a group in south Minneapolis last year, and again, this was delayed by our resiliency fund work that we were doing.

They get retail activation.

This is also known as a demising space.

It's to take larger spaces in commercial spaces and make it smaller.

We are actively working on those developments.

We're gonna have hopefully a notice of funding availability out.

before the end of the year or early in quarter one of 2027 and so that funds can be available to move, so we can contract those funds beginning in 2027.

Because of the rollover constraints that we've had in the last year and that we expect to happen year over year, we're moving more of our programs, if we can, to January to December.

as opposed to rolling through the year so that we know that we can hold on to those funds in the contracted year.

So that's what we'll be doing with those.

Stable homes, stable schools is funded and that program is moving forward or continues to move forward.

Affordable housing trust fund, now we're getting into the what I like to call one time every time kind of funding.

where these are set programs that you guys fund on an annual basis.

The Affordable Housing Trust Fund will be into the council in November with the awards for that funding.

Minneapolis Homes, the council has already approved awards for Minneapolis Homes this year and will be working to contracting those.

Shelter Response, these two activities go to the Joint Powers Agreement with Hennepin County and they're contracted.

Million dollars is being contracted and the second RFP will be announced at the end of this year.

and then we have some property management of the Kohl Center and the People's Way and the final one which continues to occur.

And for everybody's knowledge, you have numbers on there.

That's a kind of up to amount.

We spend the $240,000 for Kohl Center and the $100,000 for People's Way.

Those are funds that we use for

like upkeep, keeping the, the Kohl Center is an active building.

We make sure we keep the insurance up to date.

We make sure we have electricity and water and all those sort of things that happen.

People's Way is a vacant building, but it requires trash removal, snow plowing and those sort of things.

And we contract through our property maintenance group in CPED and they kind of do that work.

and if we don't spend that money, then it just falls to the bottom of the line.

And then the Developer Technical Assistance Program is a program where we help emerging developers.

That's something that we've been using multiple years and we continue to do that work.

All right, the last four here are Ownership and Opportunity Fund.

You guys put some money into it.

People who want to buy their buildings, commercial business owners, they come to us.

We work through a pipeline that continues on.

Great Streets programming, this is for facade improvements and business technical assistance programs.

We've announced through the resiliency fund, we had some additional funding for these programs.

We've announced that through some emails to the council over the summer.

We're getting close to the end of the quarter.

We'll be updating on the resiliency fund so you'll get an update on all of the funds that are involved in that.

and then the last two Youth Workforce Development Funding, that again is an ongoing program, funds our step-up program and the 2050 plan which you have had many conversations about.

That's for consultants that help us do all the detail work that we need to do and collect the data that we need to know about what the city will look like in 20 years.

Thank you.

Are there any questions for Director Hansen?

Thank you.

I have a bunch of questions on 38 thrive money as you probably suspect You say that you've started conversations with City of Lakes.

Was this an RFP that has gone out?

Chair Chuktai, Council Member Stevenson, this is bilateral conversations with an organization that does land trusts to better learn about the Heritage Land Trust that's within the 30th Street Thrive Plan.

The actual plan actually is a black land trust, but we are prohibited from using race as a condition on who gets it, so the council

directed us and renamed it as a Heritage Land Trust, is just to help with home ownership within the area.

So that's the first conversation.

We're working on the other four components.

I'll be honest with you, slowly, that this is one of those that kind of got held up because of the work on the resilience.

The staff that would work on a majority of what's on 30th Street Thrive is the same staff that's been working on activating the Resiliency Fund,

Chair Chuktai, Councilmember Stevenson, we haven't figured that out yet.

We're just having those conversations with the land bank to understand what options are out there.

Okay, I'm naming this because I know that there is another land trust in George Floyd Square that wants to be involved.

So I do not think direct with City of Lakes can slash should work.

Chair Chuktay, Council Member Seedens, and I hear what you're saying.

The land trust that's in the 38th Street Thrive Plan is around housing.

So I know that there's a land trust that's interested in commercial real estate within George Floyd Square.

This one would be a little bit of a scope creep if we're gonna follow the intent of what is in that 38th Street Thrive Plan.

Okay, okay, thank you.

Another question.

Chair, Chuck Tai, Council Member Stevenson, I don't.

I'm not sure of all of the land trusts.

I know there are some that are nascent and are looking to start up.

They've talked with our staff.

Again, that's why we have made a decision on how we would procure

the contract for this component.

I guess I have procurement questions here.

There are what seem like potential conflicts of interest between City of Lakes and the city.

So I just, I don't want to go down this road where all of a sudden we're accused of impropriety.

So anyways, I'm just naming that.

Okay end of this month great.

That's what I wanted to hear Okay, another question on People's Way property management trash removal well property man in general, but you mentioned trash removal and

What's the scope of this?

I'm not asking about art and whatnot as you might expect.

I'm asking because there's a lot of trash around.

Chair Chogtai, Council Member Stevenson, that's a good question.

So when we took over the operations of People's Way, we were very intentional about

basically taking a light touch to the property.

We allow stuff to go on, people to convene.

There have been structures placed on people's way that shouldn't be there.

We are responding mainly, primarily around complaints, because some of the things that are on people's way that others would say are

What's that?

Chair Choctaw, Councilmember Stevenson, it's all kinds of complaints.

Okay, okay.

Wonderful.

We've got four other council members in queue right now.

Thank you, Chair Chuktay.

First I'll start with a comment when it comes to the implementation of the 38th Street Thrive funding and the plan component.

I guess my hope is that we don't let go of that funding and that it is implemented

the way that we were asking for it to because a lot of businesses and neighbors around George Floyd Square and 38th Street have been asking for an update on this program and what is happening with it so and Councilmember Stevenson and I have been bringing this up through budget and committees throughout the entire year so at least I want to start off with that comment.

The second thing I wanted to bring up

There is a little bit on the update for City Council here that says implementation is on hold as mayor finalizes the 2027 budget proposal.

Chair Chokchai, Councilmember Chavez, we all know the budget situation of the city.

The mayor instructed one of the ways we looked at

like costs to the city is developing like savings somewhere, maybe cutting some programs that we have or not implementing programs that haven't already started.

And during the budget process, the mayor asked us to hold on new efforts that had not started until he was able to determine what to do with the budget.

I would assume so that he could potentially use the funding that are in those un-started elements as potentially ways to balance the budget.

Chair Choctaw, Councilmember Chavez, yeah I appreciate that, like I agree, like it's in the budget.

And CPED, because of budget rollover impacts, budgeted funds from 2025, five million dollars of budgeted funds for 2025 did not survive into 2026.

I'm not pointing out specific programs I just feel like this happens a lot when the council passes something and then it's not implemented by the mayor or through budget amendments are you know delayed not happening waiting till next year so it can be used for somebody else's own projects which is just not okay if it's been approved and signed I just I don't see

there ever necessarily be a reason for it to not be implemented because there was an agreement so I'm gonna just mention that because I've seen this happen multiple times since I've been in office and that's just unacceptable and it's not just for CPET it's for many different departments

and maybe it's coming from the top, it's not coming from your department, but I just wanna be able to use this opportunity to say that it's not okay.

I will say, and I will clarify that,

because I want to make sure it's on the record.

We have talked about this in many forums within this chamber.

and I've been bringing the alarm for that all year long and when there is concerns with that it isn't we're just gonna return this money for the police department that is already overspending their budget it is there are other things that we have not done as a city on the 383 thrive plan that that should be addressed and that should be a conversation but my concern is that the money is not gonna be spent and instead it's gonna be a slush fund for MPD

because that's what it does.

Departments are having to cut staff, they're supposed to roll over other money to MPD for their over-budget spending, and that's just unacceptable because now we're talking about mass layoffs of people.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Chagtai and Director Hansen for this report.

I really appreciate it.

Can you go back to the slide that talks about the Cowell Center?

My question here was,

I really appreciate this.

If you can clarify this, if you can answer this question, I'm not sure if you can.

I believe in 2026, Arts and Culture was appropriated $1,150,000 from the Downtown Assets Fund for the Cowell Center.

I'm going to give you a very general statement.

I cannot get into the details about ACA.

I just do not have that brain space for it.

The difference is what the funding went to

ACA was to do programming and support for the dance community.

So think about it as the people who would be on the stage.

And then the Cole Center management is to make sure that there's a stage and a building that's functioning.

So we do the property management, they're doing the programming.

I'm pretty certain that they have

activated that plan and issued contracts for that funding.

In fact, we're trying to get some events to happen.

Thank you.

Thank you so much Director Hansen for your presentation.

My question is about the funding, the $254,000 that's been executed with Minneapolis Public Housing Authority for emergency housing vouchers.

I'm trying to understand who is

listed in that emergency, it's part of the emergency housing vouchers and it's listed twice, so it's really 1,254,107 because they're both

seem to be duplicative of the same program.

However, Minneapolis Public Housing Authority has a $320 million levy and over 4,000 and some participants on the waiting list.

So I'm trying to understand who the emergency is for when it's Minneapolis Public Housing Authority's fiduciary responsibility to formulate

relationships with other housing service providers.

Chair Chuktai, Councilmember Warren, we can get you, I think this would be worthwhile for us to give you a briefing on the Emergency Housing Voucher Program.

Minneapolis Public Housing Authority has the structure and apparatus to deploy and oversee funding for housing vouchers and these would go to folks that are eminent, they're not public housing residents, they're folks that are

understand that.

But Minneapolis, Hennepin County also has a coordinated entry program for GRH that benefits both families and for individuals that are struggling with housing and housing issues.

Chair, Chuck Tai, Council Member Warren, we'll benefit from more of the details in a fuller briefing so I can get the housing team to give you those details.

Hennepin County, MPHA, and the city work collaboratively on an approach.

So the county does have that coordinated entry program.

Okay, yeah, I would look forward to that briefing because I'm just concerned with what MPHA is doing with their funding that they already have in their budget and while we're getting so tangled up in their business and they're not doing the right things with the funding that they currently have, they can really reach out to Met Council to seek additional funding behind programs that they want to intimate, you know,

that they want to implement in order to strengthen their process and serve the residents that are, the 4,000 residents that have been on the waiting list for more than a decade.

Yeah.

The end.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hello, Director Hansen.

Thank you for being here.

I do have a couple questions, but of course I have some comments.

I'm looking at these slides and I'm really thinking about the hard conversations we've been having around laying people off.

It's really hard to even think about.

These couple slides you have up here regarding what has happened or could happen in CPED.

I'm just like adding this money up and that's a lot of jobs for things that I believe are duplicate services,

things I believe that partners are already working on in some cases and we could be working with them and getting it done not necessarily from a funding perspective but you know allowing a full-time staff that we are paying to participate

in the work that is happening, especially around the vacant retail activation.

A lot of groups are working on that, who have money, who have plans in place already, and we're allocating, I think it's like $800,000 in our budget on there.

these emergency housing vouchers.

This has become more complicated to implement than it is actually getting a million dollars out in emergency housing vouchers to people.

And the county is doing that work too.

So this is not to like make you feel any type of way about it.

It's just my own observation of what I feel like is happening here.

I really do feel like

you know there's an emphasis on projects versus reality and like that a lot of people are doing this work already and we should be good partners at the city and work with people and strengthen relationships instead of always trying to recreate something and that not only helps with

You know, making sure people get what they need in the city, but it also allows for us to staff more people and to have them working on meaningful projects that we need in the city of Minneapolis.

I mean, that grocery store project, I have a grocery store right now.

Well, it's not my ward, but I do have a grocery store in my ward that I'm working with right now that had to close down.

There's another grocery store in Ward 5 on the border that's struggling to stay open.

We can't afford to lose another grocery store in North Minneapolis.

We're already a desert for grocery stores and a pharmacy, but I'm looking at a slide saying we're going to allocate $200,000 to the universe, basically.

I don't even know what this is.

there's there's just stuff here I feel like taxpayers really should be paying attention to this meeting to see how their money is being spent because a lot of it is being wasted a lot of it is being used in a way that is is not a good way

For the city of Minneapolis residents, especially when we're talking about how high this levy is going to be, and I'm going to keep saying it, the number is 11%, but that's not even a real number.

People in my ward are going to be paying 20%.

People all over this city is going to be paying completely different amounts of money.

So I really hope that moving forward in this budget, we look at this.

This is not a good look for us.

And then my question is, so you were talking about the Cal Center and the People's Way.

How long are we expected to have those expenses?

You and I have been talking for four years about how many city properties we haven't owned and have to maintain.

And that's a lot of money that taxpayers keep paying for.

How long are we going to do this?

Chair, Chuck Tai, Councilmember Vita, very good questions.

We should always be asking ourselves what is the goods and services that the city should be providing.

We should be looking at other levels of government and other partners and what they're doing.

CPED's always open to that conversation.

We're responding to change items in the budget, so we're giving you some spotlight, but there's other things that we spend our money on and we're

We at the department are looking at exactly that question about how are we being efficient and investing where we need to invest given what's happening in the current market.

And some of these projects that you see, some might think are wasteful based on the number of it.

but others might think that they're important because you can make some investments or stabilize some households and it's just figuring out what the right value is and one of the things I was talking about earlier about commercial property

I'll talk about city properties.

We have at least 464 parcels within the CPED inventory.

I've reviewed every single one of them.

We are moving to a strategy, a number of, I think there's a larger proportion of them.

I haven't done the math on the north side.

We'll be starting with a project around how do we activate those pieces of real estate quicker.

That has been a log jam in CPED as long as I've

been around, but we have to analyze how do we get those to the market quicker.

On the Kohl Center and the People's Way, the Kohl Center, we brought in, we went through a competitive process to get a new administrator operator for the Kohl Center.

The Kohl Center is a reflection of somebody who got bond money that could not fulfill the government program from the state.

We had to step in.

We would not voluntarily want to run a theater as a city.

That's not necessarily our core competency, but here we are.

And so we have to keep that building asset up so that we can get that operator in.

Once the operator starts, I do believe there's still going to be some product care and feeding the city has to do until they get up and running.

But there might be some conversations we have if we can't get a suitable operator about what do we do as a city with that property.

The People's Way, as you know, went through the City Council with an RFQ.

The mayor has directed me to issue a new one.

We're hoping to do that.

so that we can get responses back before the end of the year because we heard from the council that they that you want us to move quicker and we want to see somebody with more real estate experience and so we're moving as fast as we can to get that thing out hopefully in the next week or two and so we don't own that but you're you're right there's there's always a conversation about where we're taking our discretionary resources and a lot of economic development community development housing programs are discretionary

make the best decision about those precious resources and how they're making an impact.

And we try and talk about the impact that CPED has on community.

In fact, our annual report is called that, CPED Impact Report, to say when you invest these funds, this is what you get as far as the response.

Thank you, Director.

You really did answer questions that I didn't even think I asked, so thank you so much.

I do, you know, I'm thinking about this emergency housing voucher program.

So the county got, I think it was like 10 million or something like that from the state for

rental assistance, right?

Which, I mean, it's not exactly the same, but it's similar in nature.

I believe the county should revamp the emergency assistance program and make it a little bit more multifaceted than what it's been for 30, 40 years or however long, certainly.

But, like, I'm thinking about that.

Like, this million dollars

to me could be used towards something else versus that program because they have money for an emergency voucher program.

I mean even if it was used towards development.

I just had someone talking to me this weekend about acquiring a city lot and you know trying to develop a home in North Minneapolis and working with families.

So like that's something I hear more about more and more and more is the ability for people

to own homes or to develop.

There's a lot of folks who are trying to small developers who are trying to develop homes for families in on those vacant lots in North Minneapolis.

And so I or just save it and do something like it doesn't have to be spent because it's there.

It doesn't have to be spent.

I really do think there's going to there.

There needs to be some some time to reflect on

the number of people we're going to lay off or the amount of programs we're going to have in the city that are duplicated by others already.

Most of this stuff already exists, has a lot of money behind it and money's getting rolled over year after year in a lot of these programs in a lot of different institutions and so

I do appreciate you answering my questions, but it does get frustrating.

This process has been a couple years, and it's not frustrating because you all aren't doing it.

It's frustrating because a lot of times we hear on the front end that this isn't going to be an easy thing to implement or do, not even from the perspective of just staff timing, but also because there's a lot of counter, not even counter, there's a lot of things that's already happening

that we could be using and then we get to this place and these slides are before saying this is paused or this is here or this is there because of the things we were told a year ago before it even got allocated.

Thank you.

We've got three other council members in queue.

Yes, Director Hansen, I just had one other quick question and Councilmember Vitak kind of started to wade into those waters, but can you speak a little bit more to those two million that we allocated for

One million went to the county.

They received 10 million from the state.

And on your slide it was, I can't remember the wording, but it was something about we are exploring other departments for the other one million.

Chair Chuck Teich, Vice Chair Schaefer, we'll get the specifics about the second RFP.

What I think you might be conflating with this emergency vouchers is funding that the council appropriated for rental assistance.

So we will be giving our monthly report

Shortly, there's usually a lag time.

You're getting them out between the 15th and the 25th or so of the month.

As you know, from the last monthly report, we've had about, we're getting about $250,000 or so a month.

of use of that funds.

So it's likely we've contracted the first tranche.

We have not contracted the second tranche.

We'd have to come back to the City Council for approval to accept the county's terms, not what the City Council wanted.

We have not done that yet because we're not certain if we're going to actually expend the entire amount.

We don't expand the entire amount.

This is those emergency rental assistance was for 2026.

So that program would expire at the end of the year and I can get you information about the

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

And then, Director Hansen, I think the Vice Chair may have been referring to emergency shelter response.

No, I was rental assistance.

Chair Chuck, if I may, the rental assistance was new appropriation this year, for this year's budget, but in response to Operation Metro Search.

Amazing.

Thank you, Chair, Chair.

I think context matters here.

The Emergency Housing Voucher Program is completely different from mental assistance.

The program is meant to help 50 families and 50 adults facing unchartered homelessness, and I myself would not be supportive of putting more than 100 people out on the street once they get this service.

It is something that is meant to address unchartered homelessness, folks facing homelessness, folks that are on the street, in coordination with Hennepin County.

So I just want to provide context of what, if someone's thinking about cutting this program, what devastating impact it would have, especially since the program has already started, NPHA is already giving out these vouchers, and the work that it is doing to address homelessness in the city of Minneapolis, which to be very clear,

is very high and there are people out on the street struggling with addiction, mental health and homelessness.

So I at least want to provide context to what this program is.

It is completely different from mental assistance that we have and the impact that it would have should this program be cut.

Also, I do hope the public is watching these meetings actually because they should see the programs that folks might be considering cutting.

There is conversations here on this list, a street vendor grant and compliance program meant to help entrepreneurs that are doing street vending.

There is conversations here about stable homes, stable schools.

There is a program meant to help unsheltered youth in our city.

students facing homelessness in Minneapolis public schools.

There's the Affordable Housing Trust Fund to build more affordable housing stock across our city that is super important.

There's the Minneapolis Homeless Program here meant to build housing, especially for BIPOC folks that deserve access and pathways to home ownership.

There is emergency shelter response funding here.

We know that there are fiscal cliffs facing our shelters, and if we were to see shelters closing in the city of Minneapolis, that's gonna have a devastating impact on people facing homelessness.

There is the developer's technical assistance program meant to help developers, especially BIPOC developers, and have that technical assistance here.

There is youth workforce, the 2050 comp plan funding here, making sure that we actually build more housing in the city, because if you build more housing, you could hopefully reduce the rent of our residents.

So I at least want to point out to the public that these are funding streams that do matter, they do have an impact on our city, but I did want to highlight

Why the emergency housing voucher program matters is because it's supposed to help 50 families and 50 adults facing homelessness in our city.

And I think it's a good use of city resources.

Thank you.

I see that we have a few other council members that have gotten in queue as well.

So I'm next in queue and Councilmember Chavez, you covered most of what I was going to.

Thank you very much for setting some more context as to why these programs are so important and they are part of saving and improving the lives of our residents.

For the Emergency Housing Vouchers program, for context, this program goes back to 2020 following the influx of resources from the federal government given to local jurisdictions across the country.

some of that money that came to Minneapolis across jurisdictions was used to establish the Emergency Housing Vouchers Program.

That was a pilot at the time and it was a partnership between the City of Minneapolis and PHA and I believe Hennepin County to provide this resource.

It was then studied as to whether it was effective in doing the thing it set out to do and what we learned is

at a pretty low administrative cost.

It's about $1.4 million annually.

or $1 million annually, we could successfully house 50 individuals and 50 families who are currently experiencing unsheltered homelessness in a permanent manner.

The continued funding of this program allows us to prevent those 100 plus people from reentering homelessness.

I would describe that as a pretty important program for the goals that I believe we all share.

With that, we have two additional council members in queue.

Thank you, Chair.

I don't have any detests towards that program, and I'm excited about sheltering 100 individuals, 50 individuals, and 50 families.

My concern is about the duplicatedness of services, simply because through

the coordinated entry program and the homeless information management system that the county implemented in 2016.

The updates that have been associated with that program also supports wraparound services of individuals who have what's called a personal statement of need, a PSN, right?

and with that PSN it's focused on chemical dependency, mental health, social and emotional wellness and all of those things and help individuals to apply for social security disability which a lot of times having their independent funding source is a barrier to them staying housed and with them then being approved for social security disability they then have the funding in order to be able to apply for rents

underneath GRH programs and housing standards.

So it's not that I have any issue with individuals being housed.

What I'm looking for is pathways to sustainable housing and non-duplicative services.

So this helps individuals to sustain themselves, have additional money left over after their rents are paid, be eligible for programs like Section 811,

that is reserved housing that is in a lot of different housing units that then would put people in stable situations and have wraparound services associated with social security disability that would then help them to maintain themselves and their families because then not only can their children draw from their social security disability but then they also have the ability to sustain themselves.

I'm saying that this is a duplicative program and we already have one that is very tiered and very targeted towards individuals who have a professional statement of need.

If they're discharging from incarceration, if they're discharging from mental health institutions,

if they're discharging from chemical dependency treatment centers there are services that are very indicative to those needs that will serve those individuals in a broader capacity and I don't believe that this should be something that comes directly from the city's budget and they're very good at being rapid responders to those as individuals are getting ready to discharge from hospitals from chemical dependency and all of those things

They work with a coordinated entry service provider that will then expedite that process for them.

And guess what?

They're locked into a year leasing agreements that doesn't allow for whomever the property owner is to evict them from whatever the situation is and they have more wraparound services that support them further and deeper.

So this is just that and I just want to name that because I am very knowledgeable on how that program works.

and so I hope individuals from the public do see and understand that there is sustainability that is currently built into that.

I respect the fact that the city wants to, you know, aid individuals in that fashion but I don't feel like we should duplicate that process because it becomes a hindrance to where we're looking at our tax dollars being utilized.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you so much Councilmember Warren.

That's it, right?

I appreciate every single program here.

But as someone who worked at a nonprofit for over 15 years before I got here, I know that almost all of these things listed here, they have programs or partners of that nonprofit have programs that does this.

So it's not about not supporting the program.

It's about supporting people not paying for the same thing two, three, four, and five times.

because the county taxes, the city taxes, the state taxes, all these organizations are getting money from all over, federal government, state, city, all over to run these programs and people are being taxed for it.

So I appreciate housing programs, I just think we have to do a better job at centering organizations and funding for housing programs and not keep recreating more and more and more and the existing ones aren't being used to their fullest potential.

So let's not make it about if you don't support what's in the city's budget, you don't support the programs, because I certainly do.

I've worked my entire life in public service, certainly in public health, to make sure that people are housed, make sure people have access to rehab and treatment, make sure that people have access especially to government services.

and so beyond just basic needs and so it's not about not supporting it it's about being smart it's about being a person who has a checkbook that she's had to manage her entire life and understanding if you pay the grocery store two bills you're going to go back and try to get your money back you're not just going to let them keep it if you get a duplicate charge and that's what's happening here we got to really buckle down and look at these duplicates and stop charging the taxpayers of Minneapolis two three four and five times

We've got we've got a couple council members in queue and before we continue I just want to I want to just for context it's 1156 right now we have captioners until 1 p.m.

Thank you.

Yeah, I was gonna hit something on a similar note.

I'm curious who we're talking to right now.

Go ahead Councilmember Stevenson.

I'm glad that we now know who we're talking to.

To my colleague, Councilmember Warren, you talked about coordinated entry, but we both have worked with coordinated entry before.

We both have experienced its successes and its failures.

Some of its successes is that it's an extremely, well, not an extremely.

It's a mostly well-designed program that gets people off the streets and into housing.

Its failures is that there's about 1,700 people on the list and almost none of them will get housed through coordinated entry.

So it really is this lack of available homes and lack of available funding.

You know this as well as I do.

So anyways, this is me inviting us to work together on maybe filling some of that gap so that more people can be housed through this program that we know is working so well.

and I just want to highlight that for taxpayers at home who are maybe looking in on this meeting and wondering about being charged twice for the same service, this is really a drop in the bucket in terms of our entire budget and my question to folks at home is do you think that homelessness

response in the city is going well.

Do you think that we're housing all the people?

Let's think about what the outcome of what our spending is, and currently the outcome of relying on the county for housing everybody is not working.

There's a ton of people out there.

I just wanted to frame that

This is a crisis and I think spending some money on a crisis is worthwhile and also that there's plenty of opportunities for us to collaborate to go further on this as both you and I know and house people through a program that is currently functioning.

It works.

It could work better and it would work a lot better with a lot more money.

Thank you.

We're ready to continue our presentation.

Time needs, Tim Sexton, Public Works Director.

I'm going to advance to ours.

Okay, so we have two items here as part of this presentation.

The first one, I won't go into too much detail because I sent the full council some details about where we are with the bathrooms on downtown.

We continue to make good progress.

to continue talking with some sister agencies as the ability to potentially collaborate with other agencies to fund these bathrooms downtown.

I will note that in talking to some other major cities around the country, they generally, the city has coordinated with the transit agency as these bathrooms have been viewed as a resource for transit drivers.

So continuing to explore this,

We're hopeful that we can move forward next spring of 2027.

Happy to take any questions on that, but I did provide I think some good detail in an email a couple of weeks ago.

The next item is traffic safety for all.

This was a council amendment focused around traffic calming and related traffic safety measures of 5.5 million.

I can say that we are on track to spend the full allocation this year.

We're entirely using city forces to construct all of those, a suite of different traffic safety measures.

So those are the two for Public Works.

Thank you.

Are there any questions for Director Sexton?

I know Councilmember Palmisano stepped out briefly, but she had a question about traffic safety for all.

Can you speak to the traffic calming program?

I know there's a pretty long backlog of requests that are waiting.

Sure, yeah.

Chair Chuck Dye.

So we effectively use the Traffic Safety for All funding for three main categories of projects.

The first one, over half of this funding was for neighborhood traffic calming.

So we really increased the amount of projects.

So this is largely speed humps and traffic circles.

We'll note that the neighborhood traffic calming is really more of a livability issue than it is a safety issue.

And so

If you look at crash statistics citywide, it's about 1% of fatal and serious injury crashes happen on local streets compared to 41% on our high injury street network that tends to be higher volume roadways.

And so in addition to the neighborhood traffic calming, traditional projects that we funded through this allocation

We also look to increase some of our ADA improvements that have benefits for pedestrians along with protected bikeways that also have safety benefits, not just for people biking, but these have calming measures on higher volume roadways for people driving and walking as well.

That's incredible.

The first year the traffic calming program came to exist, it funded about 25 projects around the city.

This is awesome.

Thank you very much.

Hopefully that addresses the question Councilmember Palmisano had.

I'm not seeing anyone else in queue.

Yeah, through the chair, Vice Chair Schaefer, it's approximately $3 million for the neighborhood traffic homing.

Excellent.

I think next we are welcoming civil rights.

Chair Chuktai, council members, thanks for having me.

Kayla McConandira, and I am the Director of the Civil Rights Department for the city.

We have two items here, one that was one time and one ongoing, both related to co-enforcement.

This funding is a part of a larger contract with our co-enforcement partners.

Just as a reminder, co-enforcement generally is a partnership between the city and community partners under this contract specifically.

Say Tool, the Worker Center Say Tool, the Restaurant Opportunity Center, and the New Justice Project.

And it generally focuses on raising awareness of and supporting enforcement of our workplace protections here in the city.

There's a list of accomplishments on your slide, including 79 Know Your Rights presentations, 988 workers trained, 215 peer trainers prepared, 534 work sites reached, 318 workers received consultations and technical assistance,

and 109 workers received ongoing case support.

The total contract investment is just under $350,000.

Ours provided $5,800 and this work will continue throughout the rest of the year.

Thank you.

I see a couple council members in queue.

Thank you.

Thanks for the good work.

These are really great numbers.

I love to see this, and really not a lot of money going into making this happen, so excellent work.

I had a question.

Through the Chair, Councilmember Stevenson, thank you for the question.

Yeah, that would be really excellent.

That, through the Chair, Councilmember Stevenson, those numbers are specifically related to our co-enforcement partners' time.

Okay, so we've paid Satul and others, what is this, 300 and, I'm not doing the math right off the top of my head, but whatever that amount is, $350ish thousand dollars, we've paid them and they've done

Okay, well that's great.

I'm really looking forward to hearing the response to the 109 workers and how much money we're going after in that.

Thank you.

Oh, thank you so much.

I think that this partnership and this co-enforcement partnership has been a wonderful way of helping many of our workers.

Maybe this question is for the budget chair.

I'm really

The proposed budget this year, will this be gone?

Because I heard there might be a conversation with, say, two partnerships and the budget allocation or the budget proposal this year is not there.

There's, thank you Vice President Osman, there's about a 400 something thousand dollar cut ongoing to the co-enforcement budget in the 2027 budget.

Yeah, Chair Chuktai, Councilmember Osmond, thanks for the questions.

So the total amount that was in the 26 budget was that $427,862.

Noted.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah, absolutely.

Through the Chair, Council Member Schaffer, thank you for the question.

So one pot was one time funding and one was ongoing.

Thank you.

Sorry, I didn't glossed over that.

Yeah, through the chair, Councilmember Shafer, thanks for the question.

So it's the Workers Center, State Tool, the Restaurant Opportunity Center, and the New Justice Project are the three community partners on this contract.

Thank you.

I'm not seeing any further questions.

We'll continue to the next department, I believe communications.

Committee members, Brett Jelly.

Again, I'm going to pinch hit Barbara O'Brien, just had to step out for a meeting.

So I'm going to do communications, then I'll do the finance property services because they are very straightforward.

So the communications had two one-time budget amendments for relatively small amounts of money, $12,500.

Are there any questions on the communications change items listed here?

Oh, go ahead Vice President.

Can you talk a little bit more about the cultural media?

First one is a custodian.

That position has been filled.

One is for security at Minneapolis Animal Care and Control.

That position has been filled.

Wonderful.

I know all three of these items were a part of the mayor's recommended budget, I believe.

So are there any questions for Finance and Property Services?

I'm not seeing any.

We can continue.

Chair, Council members, my name is Patrick Hanlon.

I'm the Deputy Commissioner in the Health Department.

The first item that we have is the franchise fee allocation of $3.8 million.

Health is, that's for doing weatherization work around the city.

We set a target of getting at least 40% of that to EJ areas, and that's people in low-income situations.

folks that live in the green zones, and then anyone, any organization that serves people in low-income situations.

We've hit 60% of that funding right now is going towards those EJ target areas, so we're exceeding that target.

We have around 600 projects.

that are moving forward.

We did have a delay at the beginning of the year with metro surge.

We had planned a door-to-door campaign of doing outreach, and so we had delays in January and February.

We also had some master contract delays, so we're starting to hit a point where we're now accelerating and exceeding the numbers that we've had in years past.

July was a record month.

August, we haven't got all the numbers back in yet, but we anticipate that to be a record month of weatherization.

and then in years past we've had to shut down the program for a lack of funding at this point and so we're continuing on doing that weatherization work right now so we anticipate the highest numbers that we've had in this program in the weatherization specific program and we're exceeding our EJ targets.

In the other two areas in utility assistance, it was similar to the last item.

There's a fund that's one time and a fund that's ongoing.

So $150,000 that's one time and $50,000 that's ongoing.

And that's for energy assistance, that's for utility assistance.

And we have 93 households enrolled in that program.

Councilmember Vita, I know that this is a big program of yours.

and that's around $46,000 I believe.

We have 800 households applications in progress.

So we just started that with Hennepin County CAP in August, July and August.

And so we anticipate that we are gonna far exceed the need that is, or the need is gonna far exceed the dollars that we have available for people.

Are there any questions for Deputy Commissioner Hanlon?

Thank you, Chair.

Not a question, but just wanted to say thank you, Director.

This is a much-needed area of work with our partner over at CAP.

I mean, the money that they need, the amount of applications that they get in for energy assistance,

small amount of resources that we have in this city, specifically in Minneapolis because it does reach the entire Hennepin County community.

But this is for Minneapolis residents.

I really hope that we can continue to do work in this program because it is one that is extremely underfunded and it is something that is needed for people to maintain these households

and utilities is a big part of having somewhere to live and it's certainly an area where people, it's secondary.

I mean you're paying your rent, you're doing all the other things and these utilities fall short a lot more than we probably think they do so.

I really want to thank the department for standing this up quickly.

You all did a fantastic job at working to get this program operating and helping the families that we can help because there's certainly

a lot more people that need this help.

After Metro surge, it really just, the amount of families almost tripled I think since then.

Thank you Councilmember.

Thank you.

We've got several council members in queue.

Thank you, Chair Chagti and thank you Director for being here.

One quick question.

Can you just speak to the franchise fee allocation of $3.8 million?

Chair, Chuck Tai, Councilmember Schaefer, that we have a number of partners that we work with, especially in the low-income space, so if I break, I'm going to pull up some of our charts here, so I have these numbers correct.

We have programs that are especially, when we started this programming people were really concerned that renters would be able to benefit from this work and so we partner with Frontier Energy in a program called the Low Income Rental Assistance, Energy Assistance Program

About 30% of our funds go to those folks and between the two programs That's a utility program between them and us we match close to a hundred percent of the projects is about 90% of the project when we go in and so property owners don't have much of an excuse not to invest in weatherization here in Minneapolis and

We have our Healthy Homes program where we go in and when we're focusing on kids that are in lead poisoning or childhood asthma situations where we're going in and working with contractors in that space that we do, again, close to 90% match in working with folks that are in deeply affordable housing situations.

and doing energy assistance there.

And then we have our loan programs that we work with Center for Energy and Environment and then we work with Cooperative Energy Futures and we're always looking for any sort of partner that already delivers energy services either through the utilities or private organizations that we

I mentioned some of the delay that we had at the beginning of the year in January and February was with our master contracts.

Thank you.

That's really helpful.

Could we get a follow-up?

Could you just detail that in a follow-up memo to all of us?

Clerks, if we can note that.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you so much, Director, for your presentation and all of the great work that is done around energy assistance.

helping to sustain families in that capacity.

I think that seeing the 3.8 million allocation in franchise fees looks really good.

I'm concerned about the Green Zone impacts and how the remapping is going to impact, you know, areas in North Minneapolis specifically and that there was a great deal of study that went into

organizing the Green Zone mapping like that took years of work and dedication and I understand that currently there has been a lack of community engagement around that survey and the education component around the survey that is going to disrupt a lot of challenges around the remapping of the Green Zone that is going to disenfranchise a lot of families that are in

the current Green Zone area that would, you know, weed them out of being able to access programs like this that are supported by the franchise fees from from residing in the Green Zone.

So I would love to have a follow-up conversation.

I know this is not the time and the place, but I needed to put this out there on record and let you know that I do have some very deep concerns that are rooted about how

Chair Chigatai, Council Member Warren, we'd love to have that conversation and we'd love to walk through the process that we've had in doing community outreach and all of the folks that we've worked with and to hear the feedback from folks out in the community or internally here in the organization that you're hearing some of that feedback.

Wonderful.

Thank you, Chair.

I just want to thank you for the update, Director, on the utilities and energy assistance with Hennepin County Community Action Partnership.

I'm looking at this program.

It's really important.

I know that

along with Hennepin County and the state of Minnesota government, we ourselves are partners in this work.

It's also really important.

It's a good example of different partnerships that we have with different government agencies to make sure programs like this, in addition to rental assistance, stable homes, stable schools keep going to make sure that partnerships with the county continue to make sure that we have services intact.

Not seeing any further discussion, so we will now continue to the next department.

Colleagues, we've got three departments left.

The Minneapolis Convention Center will go next.

After that, we'll go to the Neighborhood and Community Relations Department.

Welcome, Mr. Johnson.

Thank you, Chair.

Jeff Johnson, I'm the General Manager of the Minneapolis Convention Center.

The Convention Center had two additional spending items this year.

The first was $500,000 to support the WWE Summer Slam and Fan Experience, which took place at the end of July and into the first weekend of August.

Minnesota Sports and Events is still gathering data on the impact of the event, but we do know that tens of thousands of visitors came to Minneapolis from all 50 states.

Visitors stayed in Minneapolis hotels, which experienced increases in occupancy compared to the same time last year.

In fact, hotel occupancy increased 10% on that Thursday, 41% on Friday, 71% on Saturday, and 147% on Sunday as compared to the same time in 2025.

The city was activated and energized and our residents were at work in the hospitality industry.

The sales and use taxes that are collected by the state have not been reported to the city as of today but I expect strong returns from this activity.

It was just a great weekend for our city.

And the second item was $100,000 for a competitive study about the convention center.

As of today, we have received the final draft report from our vendor and are reviewing the details.

In the future, I hope to be able to come back to this body and really talk about the items that were in the report and some of the suggestions

that they made for us going forward.

We did enter into a three-year agreement with our vendor so that we can update the information as needed.

So the initial expense for the report was $70,000, and then for the remainder of the term, we have that remaining $30,000 to help us with that information.

Thank you.

Are there any questions for Director Johnson?

Through the Downtown Assets Fund.

Okay.

All right.

All right.

Thank you.

I am not seeing any further questions, so we are ready to continue to the next department.

Good afternoon.

Karen Moe, Director of Neighborhood and Community Relations.

Thank you for having me here today.

We have three allocations that were made into our department for the 2026 budget.

Two of those are ongoing and one of those is one time.

All three of those were to support the work of the Office of Immigrant Refugee Affairs.

and since this is the first time I have the opportunity actually to stand here and acknowledge that I do want to express I think appreciation is the wrong word and foresight is the wrong word to use I don't think anyone really anticipated fully what we were going to experience as a city this past year but I do need to express that the additional funding that came into our department to support the work of Office of Immigrant Refugee Affairs

Yep, there I am again, was vital in supporting the city's response to supporting our residents.

What you can see here is that there were two allocations made to support the work of Immigrant Legal Services in terms of the funding that we use with legal service non-profit providers to address the needs of our residents.

One of that was an ongoing increase to the current allocation and one was a one-time funding increase for just 2026.

Before this year, we on a regular basis run a request for proposal to identify our community partners.

So we already had contracts with five nonprofit immigrant legal service providers.

We were able to use this funding to continue funding those organizations by increasing the amount of money that was available for them to provide services to our residents.

What I do want to note is that as we had to follow city practices, we had to come back to the city in order to amend the contract to increase the amount of money, but we also were able to actually increase the scope of work.

So when we set out a contract with our service providers, we have a set of agreements around what they're going to provide.

This additional funding allowed us to not just increase the amount of services but actually what they were doing.

And in this year, it's important to note that that included two specific things.

So first of all, we were able to work with our legal service providers to include habeas in their response.

for those that may not understand that was critical this year as we saw both an increase in the number of people that were being abducted but there was also quite a bit of confusion as to why those folks were being abducted and what happened to them and so a habeas petition actually requires government

to share what is the valid legal reason why they are detaining somebody.

That became a great need this past year with Operation Metro Surge, and so this funding allowed us to work with legal service providers to expand and to provide habeas.

That was not necessarily something that we were doing.

In addition to that, it allowed us to work with service providers to act more rapidly.

You understand the need for that this past year, that in the past when someone was seeking out citizenship services or naturalization services or just assistance with their legal services, they may have had time to make appointments, but this past year what we experienced was kind of the need for our legal service providers to act in a very rapid way.

We are over 50% of the spending has been spent already and working with the five legal service providers, we're confident that we are gonna spend all of those funds by December 31st of this year.

I apologize, my colleague in the Civil Rights Department had quite a few numbers and I don't have those numbers for you today, but I know that when we come back for our department budget update that we'll be able to provide you more numbers as to what those services were and the number of people that were serviced.

In addition to the increase for immigration legal services, we also had an additional staff person that was added to the Office of Immigrant Refugee Affairs, that position we have hired.

Isabella joined us in July, adding extra capacity to that office.

Thank you, Director Amo.

What an excellent example of how important partnerships are to meeting the needs of our residents.

Are there any further questions?

Thank you so much, Chair.

Job well done.

and I want to say that I would like to see the duplicate services funding from housing go to support more of the legal immigration services because I'm still having a lot of residents, constituents, near and dear friends that are really struggling with the capacity to be able to get some legal services met around their immigration status.

I appreciate the great work that you are doing, but I do feel like this is something that is just a bit underfunded and that we could support more residents and have more supportive services to ensure that families are able to

Stay here in Minnesota, work their jobs, do their things that they need to do with their families.

But we do need more legal services and more legal service partnerships in order to support these families in a greater capacity.

But I appreciate all of the hard work that you all are doing and continue to do the great work.

Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I second that Councilmember Warren's comments on how important this is.

I am concerned about the budget proposal.

One of the departments that has been looked at is NCR and as we just, you know,

dealt with Operation Metro Search.

I'm really concerned about the budget cuts when it comes to immigration services and

Can you, I'm not really sure if this is maybe a time even to ask about, not even opening the next year budget proposal, we're not there yet, we're still getting, you know, looking in the books, but can you address what those cuts might look like or how this

cutting any services on when it comes to immigration, especially when we have a Trump administration here, something new every day.

How would that affect?

I mean, what is it, a couple weeks ago, we had a Somali, you know, seeking immigrants, seeking asylum, transported to Guantanamo Bay, which is like a place historically we know that

that are housed in terrorism, terrorists and so on.

And now we're taking people to detention centers that are not appropriate place to take anybody if you're deporting them.

Chair Trungtai and Council Vice President Osman, I appreciate and Councilmember Warren, I do really appreciate kind of the acknowledgement for the work that our staff and our community partners in collaboration have done over the last 10, 15 years.

Regarding the recommended budget for 2027,

I will say that I do want to acknowledge that I think in the budget book there may be some confusion unintentionally that has been caused by, I think in past years many people have been able to identify clearly in our department's budget, you know, what the allocations are for the different bodies of work.

Given the recommendation to merge the two departments, you can't find very easily kind of the allocation for the specific programs in 2027.

So I apologize for that confusion.

I know some of the council members have reached out with questions from their constituents around ongoing funding and what it will look like in 2027.

Having said that there is a new department that will be established in 2027 and I think right now myself along with Deputy City Operations Officer Katie Topinka and the Interim Communications Officer are working together to identify what that new department would look like and what the allocations will be for the different programs.

For today's presentation, I think that is what I'm, we're still kind of in the works for that, so I cannot commit anyway.

What I will say is there was no recommended cuts to the immigration legal services that were made.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate you and your leadership on that and I just want to

talked to the city leadership and whoever is planning to really move things around.

NCR has a relationship with the community.

They have a working relationship with the immigrant community and just

We really have to be careful how we move them around and where is the right appropriate place to put them.

I would suggest they should consult with council members, community members, staffs that have worked on it and not just make decisions that could affect in the long term.

And that's my comment, thank you.

I'm not seeing any further questions, so we'll now continue with the next department.

Thank you, Chair.

I will start with the one item that the Office of Community Safety Administrative Office had itself.

which was the funding allocation for what was not called Warehouse District Live.

Throughout primarily the warm months of 2026, the Office of Community Safety partnered with the Minneapolis Downtown Improvement District or DID to put in place safety and security resources.

for the downtown corridor, primarily from June 2026 through October.

And these services have been ongoing, continue to operate very well, providing a sense of safety, especially during late nights in downtown Minneapolis.

Are there any questions about this item?

Not seeing any.

We'll continue to MPD.

Good morning, Council Chair, Vice Chair, Council President and other members.

Thank you for the opportunity.

I'm Commander Chris Brown.

I'm the Government Affairs and Finance for Minneapolis Police Department.

I'm here to speak on the one amendment here for approximately $200,000 and for the civilian case investigators.

That sounds great.

While I wait to see if any colleagues have questions about this item, there's an interesting distinction that you have here that's different from every other time FTEs have been referenced.

So you're saying you're on track to spend $3.6 million on investigations this year.

Have those two civilian investigators been hired?

Yeah, Council Chair, thank you so much for the question.

So, yes.

Case investigators, I'll tell you right now, currently we have 28 of them.

We did post for hiring this year.

We did hire three additional, which I presume came from this additional funding, so thank you for that.

We hired them in June and July, so they're just now getting their head in the ground running.

That absolutely answers my question.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I don't know if you're able to speak to this or not, but there's been some talk about with the new contract, whether civilian investigators will even be allowed to be hired.

I see that this is ongoing funding.

Through the Chair, Councilmember Stevenson, I'll make an effort to answer your question.

I think I probably can satisfy it.

this position is new.

What I mean by new is it's not new this year, it's not new last year.

Civilian case investigators was a creative and innovative way for the police department to make sure that we were doing the best we could stewardships of the police department budget to cover staffing that we just didn't have and we still don't have.

We're still working on doing that.

So the creative work was to hire investigators to work alongside the sworn investigators to be able to

continued to handle the workload so that victims of crimes would be, that their crimes wouldn't go unanswered.

So that was a creative thing on it.

Now, specific to the contract, I can't speak to the contract.

I do know that because anything that happens that's new, there always is a question about working in class and such like that, but that it would be a union question specifically.

Thank you.

Awesome.

I'm not seeing anyone else in queue, so thank you very much.

That concludes all of our updates on change items and earmarks from the 2026 budget.