Budget Committee September 14, 2023   9/14/2023

Good morning.

My name is Emily Koski and I'm the chair of the Budget Committee.

I'm going to call to order our regular committee meeting for Thursday, September 14th.

Councilmember Payne.

Present.

Lonsley is absent.

Greenville.

Present.

Councilmember Vitale.

Present.

Let the record reflect that we have a quorum.

Today we will continue hearing presentations from city departments on the mayor's 2024 recommended budget and on our agenda is the Office of Public Service and the Intergovernmental Relations Department.

We will begin with a presentation from the Office of Public Service and here to present is City's Interim Chief Operations Officer Heather Johnston.

Thank you, Chair Kasky, members of the committee, Heather Johnston, the operations officer.

I just wanted to introduce my team here who has come to support me.

If you have questions I can't answer, I have Alexander Cato, Trudy Genstad, and then Saray

and as you know, the budget team is here as well because we need them for all of these different things so I want to thank the whole crew for being here for the presentation.

As you all know, the Office of Public Service is really responsible for the City's 17 non-public safety departments.

The mission of the Office of the Public Service is to provide efficient, effective, equitable and high quality services for everyone who lives, works and plays within the City of Minneapolis.

In order to carry out this mission, we do a lot of collaboration.

We want to make sure that everyone has access to information and that they feel connected to the city government and can get the services that they need.

We also have responsibility, partial responsibility along with a lot of other folks about making sure we manage the city's reputation and are recognized nationally as a clean, healthy, thriving city and a destination of choice.

I have two org charts here.

The first org chart I provide just so that you can see all of the different departments within the broader Office of Public Service.

So you can see the 17 different departments, 18 if you include the office itself.

Just going to pause there and then we'll go into the next

org chart.

If you look at just the piece that is the office, you can see this has the three deputy city operations officers, the administrative services managers, Trudy who I introduced, our senior project managers.

One of those is Alexander Cato who you've met, and then the other senior project manager right there is one of the requests which I'll get into in some detail later here.

The other position, the Enterprise Events Manager, that was a position that you all gave us last year to make sure that we're coordinating on city-wide events.

The first year of that activity has really focused on streamlining processes and making sure we have one point of contact when it comes to large city events coming to the city.

So here are our priority objectives.

Establishing and supporting a trusting work environment is a foundation of an anti-racist workplace.

You've heard us talk before about some of those initiatives, including the anti-racism training within REIB that's being developed, some DEI work that happens in HR.

as well as the metamorphosis training that has been spearheaded by several of our leaders including Saray Garnett-Hohuli and others in HR who have really tried.

We started with leadership and we're cascading that down throughout the organization and you all were gracious enough to give us funding for that effort as well.

We also look forward and coordinate the operational objectives and the initiatives that you will put forward as the council.

In a sense, we want to make sure that we're working together to work across departments and that we have all of the folks involved in these different pieces.

So the achievements.

I'm going to start with a government structure implementation that is underway.

I am not going to stand here and tell you it's finished.

We all know there's a lot of culture change that occurs with government structure implementation.

a several years long process to get that fully implemented.

I think one of the things that we want to make sure that we're doing is that we're aligning our operational goals and how our departmental staff, as operational staff, are aligning with the policy priorities of the policymakers.

We have worked to implement the org chart.

We'll talk a little bit more about the positions that are available.

We have hired a Deputy City Operations Officer of Internal Services, Director of Race, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging, and a new Director of Performance Management and Innovation recently.

We are in the process of evaluating, going through applicants for the other two Deputy COO positions as well as the CPED Director.

The enterprise projects that were coordinated, you're going to hear a lot more on one of these projects, and that's the activity at George Floyd Square, when Alexander Cato and others will come to present you at the COW meeting on October 17th.

And so that is one area where we had a whole bunch of different departments doing work in the area, but we weren't able to bring that together until we had someone focused on coordinating those efforts.

And I mentioned already some of the streamlining of the event processes as well.

Some of the risks, you've heard us talk about employee retention.

We've had high turnover rates.

Even if it's slowing down, we want to really be focused on employee retention and what those numbers are telling us.

We want to ensure that we have done a really good job of recruiting BIPOC employees, but they have a higher rate of leaving the city, and so we want to just make sure that we're focused on working on those factors that are causing that to happen.

In addition to the government structure implementation that I've already spoken about, we have an election.

You all are very well aware of that and any change I think in an organization causes anxiety and so this is no different and so these are some of the different pieces that we are monitoring.

One of the lessons learned that you heard me talk about in the beginning of my remarks is really that culture change takes time.

We really do

As all of you know, I was here 10 years ago and I would tell you that when I came here after, is that the culture is very different here now than it used to be and we are working to make sure that we have a very collaborative culture where people can work across departments but also that they can bring their full selves to work and so we're working together to try and be patient with ourselves but also move the efforts forward that we have for culture change.

Here we have a program and staffing summary.

So the Office of Public Service budget, the current service level is $2.5 million with the change items that are presented in the mayor's budget.

The recommended budget is $2.9 million.

You can see that there's a significant decrease and that's due to some partnerships that have been transferred from what was the city coordinator's office.

to other departments.

There was $250,000 which is a pilot or a payment in lieu of taxes payment for the MPHA that has moved to Finance and Property Services and then another $125,000 which are security services related to the MPHA that we have moved over to CPED for better alignment of those payments with those different entities.

As you can see from the FTE slide,

The first, this is the overview slide, and I kind of went over some of this in the previous slide that shows you what the recommendation for the budget is.

And we have the different departments related to management of internal services, the development health and livability, public works, civil rights, race, equity, inclusion, and belonging are all the departments.

I mentioned reputational management.

That is really this communication of internal and external messaging that we do primarily with our communications and outreach branch and all the departments within that.

So the first proposal I'm going to talk about is the Senior Project Manager, and this is a new position that's being requested for $158,000 in one FTE.

This is really intending to implement the climate legacy, green cost share, and other enterprise projects.

As I think Councilmember Vitaw said at one point, we really want to make the climate action plan.

that you all adopted on July 20, 2023.

We want to take it off the shelves and move it from paper to reality.

And this is really in furtherance of that.

As you all know, we have climate and sustainability actions in many different departments.

We have them in public works.

We have them

in CPED, so we wanted to have somebody who's doing that coordination.

In addition, we're very fortunate to have both nonprofit as well as private sector partners that want to help us in these areas.

In addition to the Clean Energy Partnership, Councilmember Goodman is a member of that, as well as Councilmember Chugtai.

and so we have partners here and this would give them one point of contact at the staff level to really help coordinate some of those philanthropic efforts as well.

I think you probably all recall that in 2018 we got a pretty significant grant from the Bloomberg Foundation for some of these efforts as well.

So one of the key pieces of our climate action plan, again as you all know,

but for the public's edification, this position really will help reduce the racial disparities through the engagement and collaboration efforts and try and focus our efforts with the residents, the business owners and other visitors on these efforts.

I'm going to turn to the next request, which is $250,000 of one-time funding for George Perry Floyd Square Community Engagement.

I was talking about some of the efforts that are underway right now with our Senior Project Manager and really are working to, and you're also going to hear from him, on October 17th, as I mentioned,

on the Future Development and Opportunities.

As you all know, we now have, the city does own and we prefer to think of it as kind of holding in stewardship that property that is the gas station property.

And so the next step really is to try and engage, even as Public Works has been doing their conversations, they've heard a lot of non-infrastructure related questions.

And so this engagement is really to try and tackle some of those questions and

Thank you, Chair Koski.

I did have a question on page number 10.

I think on the first bullet point, it talks about being responsible for the management and coordination of non-public safety functions within the city.

Council Member Koski, Council Member Chavez, thank you for the question.

Absolutely would love to go into a little more detail on this because as maybe as one of the things a lot of the functions that are still actually within the Office of Public Service do serve to promote public safety.

For example,

to be more precise, the five office of community safety departments are Emergency Management, Police, Fire, 9-1-1, or the Minneapolis Emergency Communications Center, and then of course what encompasses the Office of Violence Prevention, but our Neighborhood Safety Department.

is all of those departments that work with those departments to really help support community safety.

Specifically, a lot of folks would think of the traffic control folks that are in regulatory services.

A lot of times you'll find our public works people are engaged in public safety, like if they have to barricade a certain area.

There are a lot of communications, even though there's communications in both functions, we really need to coordinate in order to ensure that the entire

organization is working together on public safety and the performance management and innovation group has worked very much on alternatives to public safety and has developed pilots that then are transferred over into some of those other departments as well.

Is that responsive?

Yes, thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

I think it's pretty clear that

Traction and retention is one of the bigger challenges I mean across the enterprise but obviously Office of Public Service probably feels it the most because it has the most staff as part of it.

So I'm constantly having a hard time keeping track of what our unfilled position count is and I'm wondering if we could get some aggregate numbers on total budgeted and FTEs.

I got a list here I can even email it to you but how many of those are unfilled?

I'd like to know the number of days unfilled.

And then I think one of the things that I'm constantly struggling with is the number of positions that are in process for getting hired, but I need more granularity, right?

Like, how many of those in process hires are in the process of reclassification?

How many of them

have our posted how many of them are interviewing and then how many of them have an offer extended so that we can get a better understanding of you know where we're at in the process of filling some of those and then specifically how long have some of those gone unfilled because I think that as we're getting into the budget and we're getting into sourcing oftentimes these unfilled positions are getting

Tchaikovsky, Councilmember Payne, thank you for the question.

It's a very good point in that even when we did present that information earlier, but that information has even changed from that point in time.

I will work with human resources to see what information we can easily pull.

A lot of, unfortunately, our systems in which we're in the process of reworking don't have all of the different categories that you suggested, but we can figure out what we do have easily and we can work on

on the other pieces because you're right, it is confusing.

I think one of the things, for example, I'll just give you one example that's confusing from my perspective is when we first got our report out of the system, we were showing three vacancies.

Well, technically we have three vacancies, but we also have two of those vacancies that are being filled on people who are on details.

and so there really are which is you know there's somebody there doing the work and so I don't I personally don't necessarily think about that as a vacancy but if it's filled by somebody who's on a detail which we want to really encourage because it gives our employees professional development opportunities they wouldn't otherwise have you know we want to think of that as giving someone the opportunity to do that and that it's a filled position so appreciate the question we'll work with HR to see what we're able to get together for y'all I'll add that to my list and I'll send an email

And I might just add, perhaps what we can do Councilmember Payne is the presentation of the legislative directive that we had that they brought for that information.

That was an ongoing, so that will be coming again to Budget Committee, so perhaps we can work to incorporate some of your information and have that part of the next presentation as well.

So we can work together on that.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Heather, thanks for coming down today and giving this presentation.

Chair Koski, Councilmember Rainville, happy to do so.

So you can see on this slide we have a couple of different pieces.

We have

The Council adopted the plan just here in July in 2023 with some really ambitious goals that we're very supportive of, and we want to just make sure that we have someone who can really make sure that we are coordinating both with the private sector as well as the philanthropic communities, but also with our own departments to make sure that we're making progress on those goals.

The other piece of that is to make sure that we're communicating about the progress that we're making.

I think one of the challenges that we've had in the enterprise is

making sure that we're talking about all the great work that we're doing.

And so that position could be the point person to ensure the coordination among all of those different parties as we try and move those goals forward for the city.

It's very helpful and I really appreciate upping the communications with those interested parties.

I think that is key because we are doing a lot.

The message just does not get out.

Thank you, and I have put myself in queue.

I just have a couple questions.

Cosmar Payne talked about employee retention, and you have that down as one of the risks, and we've seen that as a trend here, and I think we will probably continue to.

Chair Koski, I don't want to steal too much of our HR director's funder, but I'm going to steal a little bit if that's okay.

So our HR department is in the process of doing an entire reorganization.

One of the centers of excellence that's been proposed is to create a recruitment, is to really try and have centers of excellence for all of the different things that we do.

We are asking our human resource business partners to do an awful lot of different things, and so we want to really focus

in terms of equity on doing things in a consistent manner so that all of our employees are treated equally.

So we'll have like a Center for Excellence, and now I'm getting into way too much detail, I'm going to get in trouble with CHRO Odom, but for example, investigations will be a separate Center of Excellence from recruiting and then from supporting departments.

and so there's a couple different pieces of that.

One of the things our professional development or our development group is going to do is they're going to focus on both onboarding as well as some of this professional development.

We have inconsistent practices on things that are as simple as if an internal employee doesn't get a job.

having that conversation to talk about, okay, what are the next steps that we make sure you have a future here?

And so we want to try and get processes very consistent so that we're giving everybody an opportunity.

And so those are some other things.

There are some other things that we're working on with the Human Resources Department.

that we'll be bringing forward to you as well for changes, but really trying to start with that reorganization and making sure we have these centers of excellence which are best practice so that everybody's doing focus on what their role is in terms of doing that very well.

Yeah, very helpful and I'll be excited to hear HR's information too, so appreciate that.

I just had another question too on slide 10.

I just wondered if you could just walk through, I think you mentioned this and I just want to make sure I understand the actual program budget, what the plan was for 2024 and then what the mayor's recommended budget is decreased, but we're adding a couple.

Thank you for the question, Chair Koski.

The two things that were transferred out are just dollar, those are ongoing appropriations that we've had in place for a very long time related to the public housing authority.

And so they have been kind of placed, generally speaking, if there wasn't a place to put something, you kind of put it in the coordinator's office.

And so it's not really a programmatic thing as much as payments that we've agreed to.

payments in lieu of taxes.

Obviously, the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority and my budget friends back here can jump in if I overstate or misstate something, but they give us a part of our agreement, and this is a very old agreement.

we have a payment in lieu of taxes that comes to us and they are, I believe that they do get some revenue from that but I will have to work with them to figure out exactly what that is and the second piece is also related to additional security services for MPHA.

Again, long-standing agreement that we've had that is in there but we've tried to align those with the appropriate departments.

If it's just, frankly, just a payment

we transferred it to finance and property services.

Okay, thanks.

That's helpful.

And I'm sorry, Councilmember Cherakoski, I didn't mention and so the only two positions are the things there.

We only have one new position that we're requesting.

I believe you asked me to adjust that as well.

Great, thank you.

Appreciate that.

And I don't, I'm not seeing any further questions.

So appreciate the thorough presentation.

And we'll just follow up on the request from Councilmember Payne to after this as well.

So thank you so much.

Thank you for the time.

Appreciate it.

Next is the Intergovernmental Relations Department.

And I invite Director Katie Tabinka to give that presentation.

Thank You chair Koski and council members I'm Katie Topinka the director for the Intergovernmental Relations Department and happy to be here to present our budget to you all today So this slide shows our org chart.

We are a small department.

We have five point three five FTEs

and I think you're familiar with our team.

We have a senior government relations representative, that's Lauren Olson.

Two government relations representatives, Steve Huser and Indaria Falana.

We have an administrative assistant.

We just hired a new administrative assistant a couple months ago, Deltree Coles, and she's been a great addition to the team.

And then we do have our .35 comes from our seasonal legislative aide.

so that person, we don't have anyone in that role right now, they are hired to assist the team during the legislative session.

These are the priority objectives of our department.

You can see it's really about building relationships across different levels of government.

So we identify and develop relationships to pursue and protect the interests of the city and its residents.

We assist in ushering in legislation that reduce disparities and seeks to diminish or eliminate future harm.

to communities of color and under-resourced communities.

And we assist in assuring legislation at the federal, state and local levels that aligns with city priorities.

So our work really does come down to building relationships so that as needs arise at the city or we identify issues that our residents are experiencing that we need other levels of government to help address.

We can build off of those relationships and with elected officials, but not just elected officials at other levels of government, also their staff, staff at state agencies, at the Metropolitan Council, at the Airports Commission.

And so we can really build those relationships, maintain them over time so that as we have proposals to bring forward, we can get the support we need for them.

Some of our achievements from the last couple of years.

One is having a lot of conversations about staffing.

One has been staffing.

The IGR team was not fully staffed until late last year.

We are very excited to be fully staffed.

fall of 2023.

There was a lot of new hiring.

I moved into my role then.

We hired Indira as our newest government relations representative.

We brought on our seasonal legislative aide for the session and we have hired our new administrative assistant.

We also worked, led by Ms. Olson to secure

for 2020-2022.

During the 2023 legislative session our team helped to secure $25 million in new ongoing state funds

that come directly to the city so these aren't funds that we might apply for these are funds that come directly to us and also secured 42 million dollars in one-time funds during the legislative session and we've already shared that with you but just wanted to to highlight it again here.

We also worked on policy changes and successfully helped shepherd through some policy changes around public safety reform, including the bill that allowed us to expand the number of deputy chiefs we have to help with oversight for the MDHR settlement.

We worked on the legislation that clarified when body cam footage should be released and some efforts around recruitment and retention that passed at the state legislature.

We also worked to ensure that with the new local housing sales tax that came forward that a portion of that comes directly to cities and we were able to effectively increase that percentage that's coming to cities through some of our work at the legislature and our partnership with the league in Minnesota cities.

Moving on to risks, I'm going to echo, again, staff retention.

It's a competitive job market, and this is a challenging job, but we have a really great team right now, and our work is really about building relationships, understanding the city enterprise, and then understanding the state and federal government so that we know how to interact with those different levels of government.

Turnover is a challenge because it takes time to build those relationships both internally to the city enterprise and with our external partners And we really have learned over the last year that we need full staffing on our team to be able to successfully implement the legislative agenda and so like I said we have a really great team right now and

and I hope to keep this team for a while and continue to build and help the team grow in their roles so that we can continue to have success at the legislature and with all other levels of government.

Our program staffing in summary, this is for the last few years, you can see in 2022, the spending was lower.

That's because the team was not fully staffed.

There were, I believe, three staff people for much of the year, rather than the 5.35.

But we are fully staffed now.

The 0.35 position is not filled.

I didn't list it as a vacancy here because we don't fill it at this time of the year.

We just fill it for the legislative session.

So we will be hiring for our seasonal legislative aid late this year so that they're ready to come on board for the session.

Again, just to talk about our program budget, we don't have different programs like many departments do.

Our whole budget is really our program and it's mostly our staff.

This is the mayor's recommended budget for 2024 is $1.435 million.

This does include a change item, which I will get to.

But our mission is really to identify and develop relationships with other levels of government, to pursue and protect the interests of the city.

And our goals are that the city's needs are understood and advanced at a federal level, that effective relationships are maintained with legislators and the state government, that we have partnerships with regional bodies to ensure that we have a city voice and regional decision-making and impacts,

and that the city enterprise is supported by the advice and support of the IGR department.

And there are some strategies we use that you may not all be as familiar with.

So about half of our budget is salaries and then a little bit on top of that for fringe and operations of the department.

But we do use about a quarter of our budget for contracted lobbying services that support the city.

and so that really comes into play with work at the federal level.

We do have a lobbying firm that we rely on to advocate for us that is based in Washington D.C., has relationships with our state delegation members and can help organize

trips for us.

I know many of you went out for the National League of Cities conference, and they put together a slate of meetings and things that we can do to effectively lobby with time that we do have in Washington, but then they also have a regular presence for us out there, and that's really important to helping us, particularly with the congressionally directed spending, but really monitoring all federal activities that might affect the city.

We also have two different firms that lobby for us at the state legislature and support our work there.

And that's been really critical because our contracted lobbyists have key relationships and can have conversations on behalf of the city that sometimes they can learn things that maybe will be helpful to us in strategizing how we move something forward.

we also ask our contract lobbyists to focus on specific issues such as bonding or we also had one of our contract lobbyists supporting us on the stadium this last session and so getting that extra support really goes a long way at the Capitol as well.

And I think most of you are aware of this, but Lauren Olson's job is primarily focused on this relationship with regional bodies.

So she monitors the Metropolitan Council, Metropolitan Airports Commission, and makes sure we have a voice within those regional policymaking bodies, which is a really, we're really lucky and fortunate to have that position and somebody monitoring that work because that is a lot of the decisions they are making really affect the city and its residents as well.

And then lastly, we do work closely across the city enterprise with departments.

Each person on the team has a portfolio of issues that they work on.

And then during the session is in regular communication with the appropriate city department to make sure they're aware of what's happening outside of the legislative session.

They're working regularly with city departments to identify needs and things we can work on during the next session.

and then I already touched on some of the ways we measure our work, but we look at the outcomes, new funding or policy changes we've been able to influence.

One of the things we're starting to track is just the number of engagements on specific issues, so letters of support, testimony at committees, meetings, things like that to really be able to more have a metric to measure our work, which can be hard when it's really about relationship building, but wanting to understand what are some of the

the things that seem to work to influence outcomes.

And then finally, I'll just move to our change item that the mayor has recommended in his budget.

He has recommended $100,000 in one-time funds to help move the Climate Legacy Initiative forward and secure IRA and IIJA funds.

So these one-time funds would ensure that the city is prepared to take advantage of federal funding available through IRA and IIJA, which is the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

This would add capacity to track, apply for, and be competitive for funding.

and the way we envision this working would be that a contracted provider that we would fund with the $100,000 in one-time money.

We would work with a team of internal staff from budget, IGR, health, public works to ensure that we're regularly reviewing funding opportunities, submitting applications when appropriate.

and getting extra support from this contracted provider to help with tracking advocacy on behalf of our applications and also some grant writing.

and the goal would be that this budget request would result in increased federal funds for climate resiliency to improve the quality of life for city residents.

And we would also want to keep this, this would be focused on climate resiliency.

I think we'd want to keep it open enough that this added capacity could also assist with other federal funding opportunities that may arise throughout the year.

So that concludes my presentation.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thanks for that presentation.

I'm just curious, you mentioned we have a firm in D.C. What's the name of that firm?

And then you said we contract with local, I don't know, lobbying firms, I guess.

Chair Koski and Council President Jenkins, in Washington we contract with Primacy Group and we've contracted with them for a number of years.

They represent a large number of clients from Minnesota, so they do spend a lot of their time focused on members of Congress from Minnesota and have really good relationships established there.

On the state level we contract with Frederickson and Byron and and their lobbyists who work on behalf of the city are Kevin good know Jeff Hayden and Andy Pomeroy who've also been working on behalf of the city for I think at the last 12 years or so So they're very familiar with the city's work and and have good connections at the Capitol and

and then we also contract with Hilden Advocacy and Law although they're going through a name change.

I can't remember if they've officially changed their name yet or not but there we work with Allison Nessie and Brian McDaniel.

So I know all of you know Ms. Nessie who used to work for the city and then Brian McDaniel has also been a lobbyist for the city for a number of years and so we also with those relationships at the state

Thank you.

Chair Koski and Council President, so we, the House has approved its budget with, they do have a number of the requests we made through Congresswoman Omar's office

But all of the requests have been reduced, or all of our requests anyway, the amount were reduced to about $850,000.

So there is some funding for affordable housing funding proposed for affordable housing near George Floyd Square and then some funding for farmers market improvements

Again, both of those are at $850,000.

The Senate just went back in this week, and I know they're working on their budget markup.

I think we anticipate there will be some other proposals funded on the Senate side.

and so we can get an update to you.

I'm not sure that that's finalized yet.

And then they'll have to reconcile the differences and also there's a lot of big outstanding questions about some disaster aid and aid to Ukraine and other things that are gonna come into play in the budget process.

Chair Koski and Council President Jenkins.

So we did get an update on this from our federal lobbying team last week Their sense is so the federal fiscal year ends on September 30th.

So that's why that discussion is starting now I think it's highly unlikely.

There will be an agreement on a new federal budget by September 30th.

Typically they end up passing a continuing resolution so just using the prior year's budget to keep things open while they are

they debate the budget and get to a compromise.

And so I think our lobbying team thought it was unlikely that there would be a shutdown on September 30th, that there would likely be a continuing resolution, and they'd keep working on a budget compromise.

So that's what they informed us last week.

Thank you, Chair Koski.

I just want to say how much I appreciate the use of this one-time money to make sure we're taking advantage of federal dollars coming to us.

You know, I've been in many conversations with Patrick Hanlon and his team and Luke Hollenkamp, and it is amazing how we're all, as they would describe it, like waiting on the end of the fire hose for the water to come rushing out, right?

There's things that we're

to see what we're responsibly doing by way of working on our climate resilience and starting to put the infrastructure of things in place.

But we also have to get that money.

So I do anticipate this is going to help.

It's also a little bit strange to see how much some of our staff are writing proposals and writing grants that could either be zero dollars or millions and millions of dollars.

And we're going to need to be able to react

either of those outcomes coming at us.

I know they're also finding that federal money decisions are behind in their decision-making, right?

Like we will find that we should have received news on something by August 10th and we're still waiting for an answer and trying to be poised to use that money should it come in and also reappropriate those resources until it does.

So thank you for this idea.

Thank you.

I put myself in queue before I do that.

I just want to make sure I acknowledge it for the clerk that President Jenkins has joined us, also Council Member Goodman and Council Member Ellison.

My question is just on slide eight, the 2024 plan to the 2024 recommended, but there is a difference here but adding $100,000.

Chair Koski, I might have to call on Justin or Mr. Carlson to help me here.

Thank you for the question.

You're exactly right.

There is a $100,000 increase with the new budget proposal.

That is offset by two reductions.

There's a reduction in internal service charges to the department.

Part of that is how the rent for departments offing out of City Hall was recalculated.

So they're not seeing the significant charge for rent and then also the IT model changed.

So departments are now charged based on FTE count, being a small but mighty department IGR saw a reduction in their IT charge.

So that internal service reduction as well as some changes in fringe benefit selections from their employees was just north of $100,000.

Thank you.

That's really helpful.

Appreciate that.

Okay, I'm not seeing any further questions.

Thank you so much for being here and appreciate.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

And no, it's just a funny comment on timing.

I just received an email that we received $4 million from the US EPA.

So I mean, it just goes to show the value of these relationships and just how much work

this small and mighty department is doing in collaboration with all of these other departments in our city is a huge effort and so I'm glad to see the additional resources and hopefully we can get even more in the future because I think it is just a highly leveraged role that they are in and could use the additional support.

Thank you, Chair Johnson, and if I may, I don't want to take too much credit for that.

Committee.

set to hear from our Finance and Property Services Department.