Budget Committee May 04, 2026   5/4/2026

Good afternoon.

My name is Aisha Chugtai and I am the chair of the Budget Committee.

I'm going to call to order our very first regular meeting of this term for Monday, May 4, 2026.

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 proceeding 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.

At this time I'll ask the clerk to call the roll so we can verify the presence of a quorum.

Rainville?

Absent.

Vita?

Present.

Warren?

Present.

Osman?

Absent.

Present.

Chavez?

Whiting?

Absent.

Chaudry?

Present.

Palmesano?

Present.

Chair Chugtai?

Present.

Let the record reflect that we have a quorum.

I will also remind my colleagues that we are using speaker management today so please make sure to sign in.

The agenda for today's meeting is before us and as you can see we have a packed agenda.

I anticipate that we will need the entire scheduled committee time and potentially take up the entire afternoon.

We have captioners available today until 5 30 p.m.

I'll ask my colleagues to please make me aware of any scheduling conflicts so that we may ensure quorum to get through our business today.

With that, we will begin with the consent agenda, which is item number one, approving the 2026 consolidated action plan budget adjustments.

This is a standard item that we take up every year.

Is there any discussion from colleagues on this item?

I'll also note that we've been joined by Council Vice President Osman.

I'm not seeing any discussion, so on the motion to approve this item, all those in favor please signify by saying aye.

Aye.

Those opposed say nay.

Any abstentions?

We will now take up our lengthy discussion agenda.

We have numerous presentations before us.

So to begin with item number two, George Hargrove, Controller with the Finance and Property Services Department will be presenting both the fourth quarter financial status report

and the rollover of unspent 2025 appropriations.

I'll just ask that you speak into your mic.

Good afternoon, Chair Chogtai, Council members.

My name is George Hargrove, City Controller.

I'm here to present the fourth quarter financial report.

Go ahead, Rob.

Thanks.

I just wanted to mention a few things about the report.

This is through the fourth quarter of 2025, which is our last operational quarter.

It is a point in time report.

Even though the period 12 is closed, we still are adjusting the books and we're getting through our financial audit from the state auditor, and so we still have a few adjustments left to do.

The final numbers will be available in our 2025 annual financial comprehensive report, which will be issued around the end of June or so.

Just just a little recommendation that that you know we don't necessarily use the numbers that to to you know make decisions and things like that we'd be best especially for 2026 items to check back as things of things have changed and I do plan to talk some about 2026 little later on in the presentation.

Go ahead Rob.

So moving on to our main financial highlight, the city is really in a couple of different situations.

Our non-general fund is actually, I think, doing quite well in most areas.

The general fund, on the other hand, and we'll talk more about the general fund, is kind of our main fund that funds a lot of the standard services that the residents depend on, is starting to approach its minimum balance requirements.

So really there's kind of a tale of two different situations in the city.

When I came to talk about quarter three, we were projecting that we'd spend down the general fund by about $67 million.

It's now been a little bit more than that, about $68 million.

And if you divide that by 12 months in 2025, you'll see that it comes to about $5 million a month.

And we generally refer to that as negative cash flow.

So moving on here, we'll come back to that $5 million figure as well to a little bit later in the presentation.

Some of our other financial highlights, we've continued to maintain our AAA bond rating with the three major credit rating agencies.

The self-insurance fund is substantially above its minimum policy level of $116 million by about $84 million or so.

That being said, we have substantially increased our estimates for tort liabilities, so that we expect the net position, negative net position to increase to 134 million dollars or so.

We're still discussing that number with the auditor, so it's not quite final yet.

It's one of the things we need to do to close the books.

We continue to monitor federal grants and the changing requirements.

I'm happy to report for certainly some of our main HUD grants, like CDBG and HOME and things like that, they've stayed pretty consistent.

At other times, the city has gotten court injunctions and things like that to continue funding, particularly like health grants and things like that.

So, so far, so good for the federal grants that we have.

And then finally, the city was awarded

the Certificate of Excellence in Financial Reporting as of the end of 2024 for our annual financial report that we issued last June.

Moving on, some more highlights here.

Our property taxes are currently forecast, added up about $19 million under budget for 2025.

That kind of stays the same in 2026 as well to local sales tax and the downtown assets fund.

were essentially flat in 2025 compared to 24, about $87.5 million or so.

It should be noted that we have increased the transfers to the general fund, so you'll see that fund balance going down by about $10 million or so.

Finally, at the end of the year, the police department ended up about $17.6 million over budget.

Fire ended up a little less than $7 million over budget for about $24, $25 million.

In addition, we also have unbudgeted settlement costs of $5.7 million, which we split off when we did the report this year.

And continuing on with some of the highlights here in terms of our assets and investment accounts, we have about $1.18 billion, mainly in treasury bills.

That's about a $50 million decrease from this time last year, December 31st of 24, where we had about $1.23 billion or so.

In addition, I do mention a few areas that aren't quite meeting the financial policy.

Our self-insurance continues to have a negative net position as I mentioned earlier, although it is exceeding our short-term policy provisions.

Property Services is slightly under their target cash balance of about $4.6 million, although that substantially improved since last time I was here in December of 25.

Engineering Materials and Testing Lab also isn't quite meeting the net position requirement, generally due to fairly high pension liabilities in that area.

And then finally, I'm happy to report that there's a couple areas that now do exceed their minimum balance.

As I mentioned earlier, that's our fleet services.

And then our parking area as well, too, has reached its, or a little bit above its minimum balance.

Thank you, George.

Thank you, Chair Chugtai and City Council for having us.

My name is Rob Lang.

I'm the Deputy Controller.

What we presented back at Quarter 3, there was not going to be substantial changes to the information we're showing.

The forecast, as George mentioned, was relatively close.

But especially for those that are new to City Council, and as a reminder of where we're sitting, we're going to go through the fourth quarter on audited financials.

Those financials will be audited hopefully by June 30th.

So with that being said,

The General Fund, as a reminder, accounts for all financial resources except for those that are required to be accounted elsewhere.

Practically speaking, what this means is that we collect our property taxes, some franchise fees, certain services, charges that we collect, and we utilize those funds to pay for what people typically think a city would offer.

Police, fire, public works, as well as to help run the city, accounting, HR, attorney's office.

Because this fund is so critical to the operations of the city, it's very important to always be monitoring the health of that fund into the future.

So with that being said, we'll start with the cash balance.

This is the balance in the bank account for the general fund.

We started the year at $234 million.

We're ending the year at $176 million.

This is a $58 million decrease in 2025.

Similarly, the general fund balance also followed suit.

And as a reminder what fund balance is, fund balance is almost like net worth.

It's going to take your assets, less your liabilities like accounts payable or salaries, and that remaining amount is the fund balance of the general fund.

and it's an important number because that's what we utilize to determine if we're meeting the 17% minimum requirement.

So at the beginning of the year, we had $209 million in fund balance and we ended the year at $140 million, a $68 million decrease or about 33%.

Now the minimum does require $109 million in the general fund balance.

So as we stand here today, we are meeting our minimum fund balance requirement.

But there is in 25 a significant spend down with a trend that could possibly be impactful as we end 26.

So we had about $9 million in revenues budgeted that weren't collected.

The primary driver of that was property tax, as discussed in the Quarter 3 financials.

About $18.9 million uncollected property taxes that were levied.

Additionally, franchise fees had $3 million in less revenues.

However, it was an increase from last year.

However, the budget just increased faster than the actual increase in franchise fees.

This was, and then finally license and permits was under budget by 5.4 million dollars as a result of building permits was a primary driver for that.

This was offset by service charges thanks to public works and additional income that they brought to the City General Fund as well as unrealized gains and losses.

So how does this compare to prior years?

Over the last three years, we collected almost 100% of the revenues that were budgeted.

However, in 25, it was about 98.7%, so 1.3% difference.

On a budget of $660 million, that 1.3% can add up to many millions.

So we are collecting a little less than we have historically.

On the expenditure side, here we have a table showing major expense category.

What I want to draw your eye to is the public safety did have overspend of $14.7 million and then public works also $7.8 million, but as a reminder, substantially most of that was collected in revenues that also exceeded nearing netting.

How does this compare to prior years?

So average of the last three years, 22 to 24, we spend about 91% of our budget.

And in 2025, we're seeing about 98.8%, a substantial increase in how much we spend per budget.

A primary driver of that is that while certain departments have historically remained under budget, resulting in 9% savings, that 9% savings did get spent by public safety.

resulting in us being closer to fully expending the budgeted expenditures.

What you'll see here then is that we're collecting less revenue than we historically have to budget and we're expending more expenses than we historically have to budget.

The net result of that is where we're seeing this drastic decrease in fund balance.

Finally, I do want to show you this table here.

It's an excerpt from that 70-page quarterly report that we do provide in your packet, but I wanted to call it out with special attention.

This shows the budgets, the year-to-date actual and the variance budget to actual for each of the departments within the general fund.

I did highlight those five departments that currently are over budget Exact same five departments that were there in the quarter three report for the exact same reasons Assessing due to some projects that had additional cost in 2025 that bled from 24 to 25 a small amount Office of Public Service for a personnel costs that were unbudgeted for a relatively small amount and then finally we get to the big ones fire overtime police

over time is a primary driver for those as presented in quarter three and is still the case as we move into this year.

And then finally public works which we already discussed.

Thank you guys very much.

Okay, thank you, thank you, Deputy Controller Lange.

Yeah, to move on from the general fund here, and just to kind of put it in context, the non-general fund is about 60% or so of the city's budget, whereas the general fund's about 40% or so.

So our special revenue funds, I mean, these are funds that generally have external restrictions on them and are held for a specific purpose, so we can't really put them in the general fund.

The convention center certainly is an example of that, downtown assets, some areas in community planning and economic development.

You can see from the third and fourth bullet point that there really hasn't been much change at all from between the 24-year end and the 25-year end.

Basically, just within a few hundred thousand dollars, they've changed.

I can get into the reasons in a little bit here.

Rob, go ahead and switch it here.

And so this kind of chart right here on the far right side of the table here, you can see the increases and decreases in both our cash balance and fund balance.

And so in here you can see, if you go to the third department downtown assets fund, you can see that declined about $12 million in cash, $10.5 million in fund balance.

And then conversely, if you go to the bottom of the worksheet, you can see CPEDR, Community Planning and Economic Development area is up by about the same amount.

So that's why there wasn't any change this last year.

And then moving on to internal service funds.

These are funds for departments that generally sell their services internally.

Certainly the engineering materials and testing lab we've talked about are fleet services, IT, property services, stores, elements of our self-insurance as well too.

You can see here we had a fairly hefty increase from $24 to $25, about $34 million in that position in terms of cash.

That went up about the same amount from the end of 2025.

And if you, as I mentioned before, Property Services and Engineering Materials and Testing Lab are a little bit under their minimum requirements.

But if you go to the next page and look at the right side again, now on the chart, you can see Fleet Services is up about five or six million, five million and six million respectively in terms of cash net position.

They've slowed some of their purchases down to replace Fleet.

And then you can see the self-insurance is up.

quite a bit as well to, again, we continue to bank money in anticipation toward other liabilities.

And then finally we have our enterprise funds.

Most of these are based in our public works department.

They're generally run similar to businesses outside of the city.

They generally sell their services and goods to entities outside of the city of Minneapolis.

You can see here we again had a pretty big increase in that position of almost $47 million.

and then cash for about $25 million or so, too.

And then I definitely want to mention, too, the parking fund did finish with $11 million in cash, which is above the minimum requirements for the first time since the pandemic several years ago.

And then finally, if we look at the right side of this table again, just to, you know, what exactly has increased, you can see certainly the sewer, stormwater, you know, as we work down the table here, the water and parking have all kind of uniformly got up since the end of the year.

The only exception to that is our solid waste area.

It does have some debt obligations that have kind of come due, as well as some increased expenses, so they have stayed pretty flat from last year.

Okay, so at this point, I want to get back to the general fund here.

This is a very important chart that I've been using to kind of track how the city is doing.

We call this the two-year planning worksheet.

And we're basically right about in the middle, a little bit past the middle of this horizon right here.

And so we look at kind of where we've been and where we're going.

And so just to kind of walk through it, like, you know, why have things changed?

You know, where are we heading towards?

We can see the general fund balance is about $209 million in January 1st of 25.

That's the top number on the chart on the right side there.

And then you can see we had less revenues in budget and less expenses in budget as well, too, but that still, since there was such a big difference in the expense in the revenue budget, it did cause our fund balance to go down by the $141 million or so.

And a lot of times we would have had, you know, that wouldn't have gone down so much if departments, you know, had finished more on budget.

And so that's what's called our total fund balance.

You can see that represented about 22% of our, you know, a little bit more than our, 5% more than our target of 17%, you know, that we want to keep in the general fund balance.

Then you can see there is various uses in the budget planning stage, plan use of fund balance, council budget amendments, and then we have amounts that are restricted for public safety aid in the North Commons Park.

So you can see that brings us down to about 116, 117 million.

So now, you know, right now, as of the end of the year, you can see we're about at 18 percent.

So just barely above the minimum balance.

And you can see that down on the total above target where it says 7.438 million.

And that's, you know, that's our 17 percent.

Now, moving forward now into 2026, you can see there's another one, about a little less than $2 million appropriated by the City Council.

We did pay the park board the $3 million, so we removed that, so that goes the other way.

And then we did do a quick forecast at the end of March, early April.

You can see for the general fund, our expense forecast, we think it's going to be $16 million unfavorable, meaning over budget.

Again, that's driven by the police department at about 20, our forecast is a little over $23 million.

Fire about $6 million, and then settlement costs approaching another $4 million or so.

And then the reason why it doesn't go up $33 million, there's other departments and especially the contingency that we forecast as either favorable or the contingency not being spent.

And then that's, if you look at the very last line, you can see for our revenue side, we're forecasting that to be about $14 million unfavorable, mainly property tax.

And also, the other thing we're looking at is interest revenue.

We do expect, since we have lower balances now and the rates have been declining on our investments, we do expect a little less interest revenue as well.

So you add all those things up together and you can see that comes to about $31 million.

So if you take $116 million less that, you can see at the very vast line projected general fund balance as of December 31st would be about $87 million or so.

So that would be about 14% or so versus our target of 17%, you know, roughly about $22 million under target.

Why does this happen?

planned use of fund balance and budgeting, kind of covering the topics on the left side there, overspending by departments, both in 25 and forecasted in 26, less revenue than budget, and then appropriating additional spending out of the fund balance.

All those things can either decrease the fund balance, like what's happening now, or increase it if it goes the other way.

We also look at balance sheet items like liabilities, what the city owes, as well as what's owed to us, called receivables.

Those can affect the balance as well, too.

So anyway, the last thing I would say about this is this forecast assumes no more metro surges or anything like that.

If we were to hit with external shocks, it could continue to go this way.

And then finally, the very last slide I wanted to cover.

At the end of the year, last year, 2025, the City Council introduced some new financial policies to have a budgetary control report.

And you can see this is our first one that we've submitted now for 2026 by finance as part of our quarterly presentations.

You can see for the general fund, as Rob mentioned, we had assessing an Office of Public Service and Emergency Management over by fairly nominal amounts in 2025.

We don't forecast those to be over budget in 26.

You can see the fire.

is in the middle of the page here.

What I'm looking at is the 2025 budget variance column and the 2026 budget variance column.

You can see the fire is holding pretty steadily at about $6 to $7 million over budget.

And then finally, the police department is about $17.5 million over for 2025.

And then now we're forecasting about $23.4 million or so.

And then we have the MDHR settlement costs.

And you can see we pulled that out of the numbers.

We felt that was best because there's multiple departments.

That's unbudgeted.

So we spent about $5.7 million last year, and then we forecast about another $4.3 million.

My understanding is we're going to try to budget for that in 2027.

And finally, the last department is Public Works.

they are over in budget but only because they're bringing in a lot of revenue and since they're generally selling hours or time or work on other what's called work for others if they if they are getting more revenue then they have to have more expense because they're doing more than what they had budgeted so you can see there for 2025

If you take, you know, they're over budget by about $7.6 million, but also are favorable to budget by $5.3 million, because they're doing work for others, bringing in revenue.

You can see we had a deficit of about $2.3 million.

That was caused by the last stow event in 2025, as well as, I believe, copper wire theft as well, too.

And then finally in 2026, we're forecasting them to be about even.

We expect expenses to be about $6.8 million more than budget, but then we expect revenue to be about $6.8 million over budget, too.

So cash-wise, they're about on budget or so, and you can see it represents a pretty small amount of their total overall budget.

So with that, that concludes our fourth quarter financial presentation.

We now stand for any questions the Council may have.

Thank you for your presentation, Mr. Hardgrove and Mr. Lang.

Colleagues, are there any questions?

Thank you, Chair Chug Thai.

We're going to hear from MPD directly about overtime.

I see fire is here as well.

This question is about baselines, and I think that we can look to the last year and recognize that nothing about last year was baseline.

But I do feel that particularly in the fire space, we seem to be consistently hitting overtime overages.

Despite being fully staffed So this I don't think this is a fire department question.

It's more of like a controller question at what stage when you're consistently hitting the same number year after year do you just Budget for that right?

I I actually think this is a better question for for

the budget office, just around how we plan in the future when we're consistent in the overages.

Welcome.

Thank you, Chair Chug-Thai, Council Members, Deputy CFO Jane DeCenza.

I'm still acting director of the budget team as well.

That would be something that's up to elected officials to change in the budget process.

Overtime is not one of those categories that we can inflate year to year.

more overtime might make more sense or more FTEs might make more sense.

I think both in the fire and the police space there's a bit of a lag in new FTEs translating to reduced overtime.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Chiu-Chi.

I actually have a question that follows

like the information shared on the report that you attached to the presentation so I'm looking at page six of the report and just trying to get a little bit more clarity because it states there at the top of it that there was approved 2.4 million dollars of approved settlement agreement funding

that was

how to reconcile all these very different figures even in the report.

Yeah, I'm trying to get clarity on that since a total is suggested at six million.

And then also if you can speak more specifically on what exactly was spent and why this was anticipated or unanticipated as I thought a lot of our settlement agreement needs are mapped out in our

Thank you Councilman Wonsley.

So the amount spent by police was 3.6 million dollars.

The 5.7 million dollars includes various other departments.

So there was some spending within the attorney's office for some contracts that's also being added to that 5.7 million dollars.

Correct, yes.

So we do have a detailing, a work paper of showing certain contracts and which department is paying for those contracts.

For example, the ALIFA contract itself is covered by the attorney's office.

It's about like 1.1, 1.2 million dollars in total cost for that.

So the 3.6 plus that 1.2, we're already getting closer to like 4.8, 4.9 million.

Okay, under the 3.6, because I don't think it lists of what was that inclusive of for the police.

You kind of mentioned the other half for like, Alifa.

It's all the same.

So a lot of the settlement agreement did happen years ago, 22, 21 timeframe.

Okay, so that was the funding source used for at least $5 million.

It's still that's outlying of $700,000 difference.

Yeah, I think what might be best right now, Chair Chuck Tynden, Council Member Wansley, is if we could go back to our, we have a data, kind of a little database of what all the settlement agreement authorizations were and their cost.

Yeah, that would be really helpful, especially I know some of us have been in conversations with Council President Payne and also Council Member Whiting ahead of getting a meeting for the settlement agreement committee so that we're truly understanding where are we spending on, is it actually in alignment with the recommendations that's put in the report, especially if we're doing some overspending and how we're not factoring into those things proactively.

So that information will be tremendously helpful.

Thank you.

Just a note for clerks, the administrative follow-ups that came out of this set of questions is first to have finance detail out the settlement agreement-related costs, including providing some further details on the police department's use of

costs related to the settlement agreement.

And then just some reconciling to make sure that we're understanding very clearly where money is set aside year after year for settlement agreement related costs and when that pot of money is billed and who's managing.

settlement agreement related costs.

Any follow-ups needed for you guys?

Okay, thank you.

Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for this presentation.

I am curious of your perspective of some of these things.

Some of this is similar to what Councilmember Wonsley was asking, is that we keep hearing MPD was $20 million over budget, but this report says only $17.6 million.

Absolutely.

So the $3.6 million difference, if you add that, sorry, $3.6 million settlement agreement, and you add that to the $17 million, you'll get closer to that $20 million that you were discussing.

So on this report that we're showing, for quarter four, we did pull all settlement agreement costs from the various departments and put it into that bottom line.

I'm going to actually back up my presentation a little bit here.

and put it into a bottom line right here where you see $5.7 million in that PowerPoint, that's where all settlement agreement costs are.

So including the $3.6 million settlement agreement that the police spent.

I see.

That is the majority of what you're seeing.

Thank you also for highlighting fires overage as Council President Payne also noted.

We know we've got a consistent problem there too.

I seem to recall that fire is usually about five million dollars over budget for staffing and is six point eight million over this year.

Do we know the source of this higher than normal amount?

Sure.

Madam Chair, Council Member Paul Massano, Committee, my name is Luke Scardiglia, I'm the Finance Director for the Fire Department.

So in answer to your question, I would say the majority of that overage does come from staffing and over time, but there are certain other aspects in the department cost such as really non-discretionary items such as utilities,

Our fire stores budget, which provides all the supplies to our stations.

We have a budget for linen and laundry.

Even our equipment budget is quite light.

So even in those items on an annual basis, we're $800,000 to $1 million over budget in there as well.

that is on top of staffing.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't, I wanted to add that part of our staffing overage, we do get a reimbursement from the state of Minnesota for PTSD, for our members who are out on PTSD.

That amount does not get reflected in our expense budget, it gets reflected in revenue, but it's really a direct reimbursement off of the wages for members who are out on PTSD.

And then Mr. Scardigli, it's my understanding that while you have a firefighter out on PTSD, that's that's not a hireable position.

They're still occupying that seat that FTA slot FTE slot in on our books.

Is that correct?

that ends up with a

that continues to be an FDE in our department that we cannot replace.

Yeah, thank you.

That highlights a different issue, but I think is good to bring into this conversation.

Another question I have, and this is probably back to the finance department, or maybe Director Sexton, is the public works overage

in public works seems highest in TMR transportation maintenance and repair and traffic and parking and I'm curious if that's primarily due to unexpected snow events or what else goes into that.

Yeah, through the Chair, Councilmember Palmesano, my name is Tim Sexton, Public Works Director for the City.

That's exactly right.

We had about 96% of our overage was related to copper wire theft repair, which I think we all had a conversation together about the planned potential to go around a million dollars over for that.

The second piece was directly related to responding to snow events, particularly events in December of last year, which is why there was no opportunity to provide more notice about the potential to go over.

We had, just for reference, in 2025, December, we had three snow events

in December.

For reference, that's the most snow events we've had in December since at least 2009, if not earlier.

So it's really difficult for us to plan for that.

And I think responsible budgeting means we plan for about one snow event per month in the winter.

That's historically been pretty accurate, but we recognize, I think as a city, that we still need to do that work.

And so in this case, yeah, we had a heavy winter, excuse me, December snow.

Yeah, that sounds really reasonable.

Thank you.

My last question is just very general and more finance-y.

When I read this and look at the bigger picture, it feels like our special, our internal, and our enterprise funds are all in pretty good or better positions, but it's our general fund that's hurting that we need to be most concerned about.

We have it looks like $7.4 million buffer over that required 17%, which isn't much.

I remain concerned about that.

Yeah, Chair Chugchai, Councilmember Pelamiso.

Yes, I totally agree with your assessment of it.

As I mentioned at the beginning, it's kind of a tale of two cities.

Non-general fund, I think, is doing just fine.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So much to go over here, so I think I just have a couple of questions as I get my bearing of this.

I see in here, I pulled out the parking fund in particular, but I was hoping to get a little more education from you on those different special funds.

The parking fund in particular has $194 million in it.

That's net position.

Yeah, yeah, um, oh, excuse me, um, Chair Chogtai, Councilmember Stevenson, um, yeah, as Deputy Controller Lang mentioned, cash-wise, it's got 11 million dollars.

The net position is quite a bit more because it's an asset-intensive business that owns a lot of parking ramps and things like that, so the undepreciated amount is recorded as a net asset to the city.

Oh, okay, it's because it's buildings that exist.

Okay.

Okay, so then that's the same with sewer and stormwater.

Yes, that's that's correct.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Thank you that clears up a lot Secondly, I just you said it quickly.

And then I had a question for Fire.

I don't know if you could come back up.

Thank you.

What percent of employees are out on PTSD and is it abnormally high?

Is it consistent yearly?

So, Madam Chair, Councilmember Stevenson, currently I believe we have between 25 and 30 members out on PTSD leave.

That would constitute about 8% of the department.

We have 434 authorized sworn.

and that number has stayed pretty steady, consistent over I would say the past six to nine months but it has shown an incremental increase over time.

It became quite prevalent in 2025 and has stayed there in 2026.

Chair Chuktai, Councilmember Stevenson, I'm Wes Van Vek, I'm the Assistant Chief of Operations.

Yeah, I'm just curious, it was said there was about 8% of employees were out on PTSD leave right now, and I'm just curious, is that normal?

Councilmember Chuktai, Chair Stevenson, or Chair Chuktai, Councilmember Stevenson, this is a fairly new program, so it's hard to make comparisons.

We didn't have PTSD leave until two years ago, and since then it has stayed fairly consistent.

Before Chief Van Rickle, before you go back, just as a follow-up, I appreciate that you note the changes to state law that resulted in the way that we account for PTSD leave in the fire department prior to that.

Chair, Chuck Tye, I believe that was not included in anything.

Gotcha, thank you.

Thank you Chair Chogtai.

Just a quick question kind of based particularly for ACU.

This isn't a question for fire so feel free to sit down.

Particularly relates to kind of the general fund balance details here and kind of just trying to get an understanding here.

since I'm new, I know this target number of 17% is the minimum kind of required.

I guess like, you know, little more context required for what is like, why is that 17% kind of listed there?

Yeah, sure.

Chair Tuktai, Councilmember Whiting, Whiting, excuse me, excuse me, I apologize.

Yeah, that amount, the $109 million, it's a calculation of fund balance and there's some other things that go into it, like our internal service fund.

It is set by the City Council and the annual financial policy.

So why do we have a balance like that?

Generally,

it's really like as a cash flow part of it is cash flow like for example we probably will get to a negative cash balance in the next few weeks you're not a huge one but so like the cash kind of comes in at different times you know a lot of it is property tax it comes in just twice a year and when we get our infusion of property cash it'll go back up positive again so that's that's one of the main reasons it helps to protect the city against paying interest as well

as a lot of areas, a certain number of weeks or months in order to be able to operate and reserve.

Because you never know what will happen.

Thank you.

Yeah, and then just kind of piece of something.

So it's sounding like, right, since if we are under that piece, is there any kind of a financial consequence or something for being under or at kind of that 14%?

Yeah, Chair Chugtai, Councilmember Whiting.

There's no direct consequence.

It does put the city a little more risky.

We certainly have talked about credit ratings before.

I guess the biggest consequence is us in the finance office.

We don't feel like we can authorize things, spending below the amount that the council has approved.

That played a huge role in our decision not to roll over budgets, which I'll get to in a few minutes here, from 25 to 26.

Because we looked at it and said, well, if we were to approve this, we'd be violating council policy.

So that's probably the biggest consequences.

It's really kind of on our end, I guess, too.

Councilmember Chugtai, I mean Chair Chugtai, Councilmember Whiting, I think I'm not certainly not an expert and I would defer to other people.

I would say that there's just a number of things that go in the credit rating.

That's one of many.

There's other things that aren't as controllable by us, such as the property tax base, general economic health of the Twin Cities, you know, things like that.

So there's really a wide range, but that is mainly managed by our banking and debt area.

That's really helpful.

Thank you and just to reiterate historically the primary caution that finance will bring to us when any adjustments are being made to planned use of fund balance is the negative impact it can have on our

Credit rating, and then the subsequent impact that can have on our ability to make capital investments and manage debt for our institution.

Sorry, one more line of questioning.

For the enterprise funds, the things I referenced earlier where it was the assets that were

we were talking about.

Chair Chug Thai, Council Member Stevenson, I do believe Public Works has some work in that.

I would have to defer to the department exactly to get an exact list.

But I do believe there is maintenance liabilities and things that are planned for.

They do what's called pro formas, where they forecast out a number of years of what the rates would be.

And in there, certainly major projects and things like that would be as part of the pro forma.

Okay, so that budgeting, would that be, would that fall under Public Works budget then?

Wonderful.

And then I'll end with a couple questions for you.

I think, so just looking at slide seven where you walk through the decrease to the fund's net position and the general fund's cash position.

and both to the 58.3 million decrease in the cash position and the 68.6 for the funds.

Yes, thank you, Chair Chugtai.

So for planned use, we originally started with a planned use of fund in 2025 of approximately $24 million.

Then there was an approved rollover of about $42 million.

Summing those up, you get about a $66 million planned use of fund balance in 2025.

So then we're looking at the decrease of $68 million.

And admittedly, that decrease was close to the planned use.

The difference that you'll see here, though, is that that planned use of fund involved maybe other departments fulfilling certain other roles that they had or a certain other spending.

But what ended up happening is because of public safety overspend, certain departments might not have spent for the projects they were thinking and wanted to maybe roll over into 2026, but now can't because that money was spent.

That absolutely answers the question.

And then

I know the finance department plans out the use of fund balance into future years, including for balancing the recommended budget that's presented in August.

How has this significant

Thank you, Chair Choctaw.

Thank you.

That completes the discussion on this item.

I'll see if colleagues have any final thoughts that they would like to get in queue for.

Not seeing any, I will direct the Clerk to file this.

Nope.

Thank you, Chair Chucks.

I did want to make sure I heard this correctly.

You mentioned for the under collection and franchise fees.

That was a result of expenses tied to that exceeding the revenues.

Yes.

So for franchise fees, we were $3 million under budget on the revenue we collected.

But we did see year-over-year growth in franchise fees from 24 to 25.

It's just that the budget increased at a rate higher than the growth.

When it comes to the revenue, if I'm understanding the question correctly, it is actually charges, service charges, that public works would charge internal or external clients for work that they do, and we would collect additional revenue for that, but collecting that revenue also incurs additional salary expenses.

So I'm thinking health and sustainability is a factor into this one.

Oh, sorry.

Sorry.

Mention franchise fees.

Never mind.

So public works.

OK. And I thought we approved an increase in those fees for last year.

So that's why I was surprised to see that we under-collected.

Through the Chair, Councilmember Wonsley, so while the franchise fee rates have increased due to the agreements with the utilities, so the franchise fees are highly variable as a revenue source.

So if it's a warm winter, for example, we're not going to collect as much in franchise fees.

So as people's bills are lower for electricity and natural gas, we will not see that revenue that we are meant to be sort of segmenting, a portion of which for the climate work.

So it is true that the Council voted on another increase to franchise fees in December.

Thank you for that clarification.

Wonderful.

All right.

With that, I will ask the clerk to file this report.

And we are now ready to move to item number three on our discussion agenda, which is the rollover of unspent 2025 appropriation.

Thank you Chair Chugchai, Council members.

This is the second presentation we have today to talk about our rollover process and the resolution to rollover budgets from 2025 to 2026.

So again, Council members, the rollover process, like what is a rollover?

It's really like moving leftover budgets into the next year to complete the work from the previous year.

So that's kind of the simple explanation of what a rollover is.

You can see the Council has addressed it in Section 4.13.10 and I won't read off the explanation, what it says in it but that's basically the authorizing language and the process is administered by the Finance Officer here at the City of Minneapolis

So this year we have a slightly different rollover format than we've had before.

But backing off a little bit, as we mentioned before in our first presentation, this year the finance officer decided to limit it to just public safety aid and the non-general fund.

And again, there's really two primary reasons for it.

One is we were only $7 million over the target.

Like last year, we rolled over about $42 million in general funds.

So it was way, if we would have done anything like

the year before, we'd have been way under budget.

So that's really the main factor.

And then the other factor was just our projections of how the public safety area was turning out.

So we felt it was prudent for the city to not roll over the general fund balances.

So anyway, the report's separated into three sections.

Section one is the public safety aid.

That technically is in the general fund, but restricted.

Section two is rollovers mandated by the City Council that are outside of the policy, so that's a new section this year.

And then section three is the non-general fund rollovers.

So just to go over the process real briefly, at the end of January, we sent out a request to the departments.

We advised them that we couldn't do the general fund this year, but we can do the non-general fund.

They were given until early March to submit their requests.

We did ask them to submit encumbrance detail, which is another name for purchase orders And so they submitted of the purchase orders Which ones they were you know requesting to be rollover some of these things were in a project format sometimes requested rollovers for a whole project or so

So then in the mid-March or so, we assessed the rollover requests.

We looked at the department budgets to make sure that they still had budget remaining in their budget that could cover the rollovers.

We also looked at the fund's health, which in this case was mostly the general fund, although there were a few others that we looked at.

And then finally, the resolution does state that grant funds, capital funds, things like that are automatically rolled over.

from year to year because those tend to be multi-year projects.

And then lastly, the following here is really a summary by department of what we're rolling over for the year, what we're requesting to be rolled over for the year.

So you can see the public safety aid is, the bulk of it is in neighborhood safety.

We also have community safety pilots in finance, so that probably accounts for almost $6 million or so of the $7.5 million total in the lesser amounts in the other departments.

Council-mandated rollovers.

Those are generally the resolutions that started with kind of notwithstanding.

We felt we had to include this in there because they weren't part of the general fund appropriation just to make sure we can include the budgets.

Again, that was mainly CPED for the emergency housing vouchers and the clerk's office.

So that came to about 1.5 million.

And then finally, the non-general funds, which is pretty similar to other years.

So none of this is in the general fund.

You can see the vast majority is $85 million for CPED in mainly their special revenue fund.

Lesser amounts are IT, mainly for some pretty big IT projects they have, as well as fleet as well to cover purchase orders for vehicles and equipment replacement.

So these should generally tie to the details and the resolution.

I tried to spell out acronyms the first time something was mentioned, but otherwise, yeah, the details are generally sorted by department here, and they're in the resolution itself too.

So with that, that concludes my presentation on the rollovers today.

I certainly can stand for any questions at this time.

Thank you for your presentation, colleagues.

Are there any questions on this item?

This item will require an approval, so just noting the distinction here.

Chair Chugtai, Council Member Stevenson, as far as the trends I think it'll be a difficult year to roll over funds at the end of this year as well too.

After that it really kind of depends how things finish this year if we have a lot of departments under budget and it looks favorable then you know that could change or so but I think it will require some sort of rebuild of the general fund balance before we can get back to that.

So basically, you don't expect rollover funds in the near future?

Yes, that's correct.

Not for the general fund.

Non-general fund, I don't anticipate any changes.

We still should be able to roll over items that aren't general fund.

All right, I'm not seeing anyone else in queue.

I will move approval of this item and ask for a second.

Any further discussion?

Seeing no further discussion on the motion to approve this resolution.

Those opposed say nay.

Any abstentions?

The ayes have it and that motion carries and we forwarded to Thursday's council meeting for final consideration.

Next we'll move to item number four.

and this is the 2022-2026 Council Dedicated Funds.

This is the first of two new presentations that will come before the committee today as a result of changes to the city's financial policies.

I will invite Deputy City Operations Officer Brett Gelli to join us and begin this presentation.

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

If I can ask you to just pick which mic you want.

There we go.

Perfect.

My name is Brett Jelly, deputy city operations officer and I'm here today to introduce receiving file report on the 2026 council dedicated funds.

So as background,

The Council dedicated funds are amendments to the mayor's recommended budget and they are adopted as part of the general appropriations resolution.

The funds are dedicated for specific purposes and they're often also referred to as earmarks.

These funds are restricted and may not be expended or reallocated for any purpose other than the purpose specified in the appropriation, except as provided within financial policies.

Administration is required to provide an written update on these funds by April 30th and August 31st of each year.

Good afternoon Chair Chugtai, members of the committee.

My name is Chris Thokus and I'm the Operations Director for the Health Department.

I have two very brief updates.

The first is on the South Minneapolis Underserved Community's Opioid Response in the amount of $150,000.

Our intention is to expand the Brixadi pilot project that is currently going on in the city.

And as a reminder, Brixadi is a medication used for opioid use disorder.

So the intention is to purchase additional medication for that pilot for use by the FQHCs in the city.

The second update is on the Autism and Water Safety Public Health Program, which is $25,000.

Alright, so just to provide an overview of how we'll conduct discussion for this item.

As Deputy COO Jelly outlined, he will go through, we will go through by department, each department's updates as it relates to this report.

We'll take up discussion so that staff from each department can come in and out of the chambers and we can stay on track with discussion here.

So, on the two items that the Health Department just presented, South Minneapolis Underserved Communities Opioid Response and the Autism and Water Safety Public Health Program, are there any questions or discussion from the committee?

Thank you so much.

I appreciate you coming over and these are a couple of items that I really care about and I authored the amendment to bring this forward.

This was meant to address the opioid crisis in that area with a lot of folks that are dealing with a lot of addictions, especially in

South Central Minneapolis, either on Franklin, Native American, East African community.

I'm really excited about the

program that has been great, having a medication that will get off people, addiction.

I do want to see data, how many people we have helped.

I know that this program has been working for the last couple of years, maybe two and a half years.

So I do want to see

In the future, not today, but in the future, what the outcome is.

And this is something that we can continue to fund.

So I do welcome that.

And also the water safety.

This was

Mainly one community will continue to suffer young kids with autism that are drowning in waters.

Every summer we see it, especially the East African community.

A lot of young men are there, so education awareness and

was the test around that.

I had a lengthy conversation with the health department to kind of address and it was kind of new to the health department actually to kind of learn, meet the expertise and understand what is causing this and how do we as a city be helpful to that.

So I am a little bit

Through the Chair, Council Member Osman, I would actually defer the details of the project to our Deputy Commissioner, Heidi Ritchie, who is out of the office ill today.

Oh, no problem.

No, no, she's wonderful.

Deputy and I have a conversation.

She's wonderful.

She knows this program very well.

So I appreciate you coming and presenting.

But I'm excited that the RFP is coming forward on that.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Now before we continue to the CPED section, Deputy COO Jelly, if you'll come back just really briefly.

I think as a level set, this is our first time going through a report like this and a new change to financial policies that this is responsive to.

If we don't see a council dedicated fund item on the list of items that you will be presenting, what does that mean?

Chair Chugtai, thank you for the question and I was going back to grab my financial policies.

So there are, I think there's a number of categories of budget amendments.

So this is very specifically about the council dedicated funds and earmarks and if you look in the budget book under each department you will see each one of these called out.

So

That should tie this list of 13 items will tie directly to what's listed as Council dedicated spending in the budget book.

There were some other Council amendments that might have had different sources, and my understanding is they'll be included in the mid-year budget update.

Gotcha, thank you.

I'm so sorry.

Go ahead, Councilmember.

Thank you.

I feel like we need to reset a little bit, Chair.

I'm trying to understand this presentation a little bit better.

One, it is about council dedicated funds.

There's a specific bracket in the budget that's council dedicated funds.

I'm not seeing a lot of the budget amendments that a lot of us authored last year in December here.

And I'm trying to understand where those are at, what is happening with them, a status update.

I think what you were saying was that if they're not on here, then it means that there's no issues with them.

But what I heard was the opposite, that that's probably going to be a mid-year thing.

So now I have concerns that a lot of the budget amendments, particularly, I'm thinking about 383 Thrive,

Many other concerns that I have, I want to hear what's going on.

So I guess any clarification on is this just one part of the budget that we're going over from last year that's just council dedicated funds?

Yeah so I'll start with saying council dedicated funds and earmarks are the same thing so when we're talking about council dedicated funds we're not talking about council initiated budget amendments we're talking about just earmarks initiated by the council.

And so every August we receive the annual report that walks through every single budget amendment and the status update as to the implementation of that amendment.

That I think is the distinction staff is trying to lay out here.

Chair Chugtai, members of the Budget Committee, my name is Eric Hansen.

I run the Department of Community Planning and Economic Development and I'm here to deliver an update on five items.

The first item is a $50,000 investment in public housing tenant organizing.

We're moving forward with this.

This is through the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority's High-Rise Council and we hope to have contract through the council later this month.

The second one is Tiny Homes Big Dreams program.

This is $15,000 of CPED-directed funding.

This did not come with additional funds, but we worked with the author of this amendment, Councilmember Chavez, to do some investigation of how to make it easier to do tiny homes in the city.

We have a staff work team that is starting to put together the scoping for that phase.

the third item on our list is emergency shelter operation funding we are working this is something we were doing with it's a program we're doing with Hennepin County we're now working out the contracting and we're hoping to have that contract to to the council sometime in May which probably is looking like June considering the timeline of the council meetings

The last two, we have a commercial adaptive reuse study.

This is $125,000.

This was something to help us understand what's the impediment and barriers to building conversions within downtown high-rises.

It will be just very direct.

We are working with existing resources to try and figure out how to come to some information.

We've been doing some research.

through the last few years with our team around what other cities have been involved in, what we are seeing in Minneapolis, and based on what you just heard about the rollover and the budget situation, we're going to be using existing resources to meet the purpose of this council direction.

and the next one is invest in child care workers.

This was also a creation of an FTE, but it did not have associated funding for it.

It was asked for CPED to find funding to fund the FTE.

We have a contract with the YWCA to do this work.

Hopefully I said the W instead of the M. I think it's the W.

One of the whys is doing this work for us, as doing contract work for us.

We are using existing FTE resources within our employment and training group.

This is supposed to be a person who would help shepherd people in into this career track.

And so we'll be using existing FTEs in that to meet that purpose.

And that's it for me.

If you have any questions, I'm

Wonderful.

Any questions for CPED?

Thank you, Chair Chokti.

I'm actually speaking to item number seven, the investment child care workers one.

As you mentioned, originally, this budget amendment was an earmarked to create a FTE position for the specific sector.

And, you know, I

and not necessarily oppositional to the proposed change of essentially still using your existing resources through the YMCA contract to fulfill this.

But where I'm a little bit confused is I still thought under this financial policy, even this proposal would require a council vote because it was an earmark that's currently not being enacted in its

Chair Chigtai, Council Member Wonsley, so this one was unique as if it was a direction to use existing CPED resources.

The first three we had had actually

Three of the five of these things had funding.

The Tiny Homes Big Dreams one was a direction to use existing resources.

Same with this FTE was a direction to use existing resources.

I would defer to Deputy CEO Jelly about the policy, but we're wanting to be very clear that we're trying to meet the purpose of the intent to get here without

having to find additional money to find a new FTE and fill it.

We'll fill it with a FTE that is working on employment and training programs right now.

So I'm not sure about the answer to the question about whether the Council needs to act on it.

Yeah, because I'm also looking for the actual budget language.

I've never seen a state directive to use existing funding.

I think that's usually just the earmark.

So an earmark within your existing budget as opposed to finding a new funding source to give you that additional dollars.

I think we did this as an earmark.

So even as an earmark using existing resources, you're proposing to not use it in its original intent.

So again, yeah, I think this will be a question around

Chair Chogtai, Councilmember Wansley, I think my recommendation on this one, as we looked at the policy, it talks about the purpose.

of the amendment.

And I think as we are embarking on this reporting, it might be a good topic to sit down with committee leadership and finance and review.

In this case, CPES proposing to meet the purpose of the invest in child care workers and using their current resources to do that and whether or not

that meets the intent of the author or not.

So it might be something that we want to have some further conversations about.

We will be coming back, as I noted, again to report again on this later in the year.

Because there are very clear processes on if the administration is not going to use the money,

Yeah, I was a co-author of that policy.

So very aware, I think it's that piece, though, still, if it's an earmarked, it's great to hear that the implementation is moving forward, but I think we're still getting at the technical aspect of even bringing a change of state.

We're not going to implement the budget amendment as it was passed, which is an earmark, and we're going to propose this instead.

That, as the author of this

I think also fell under the same scope regardless of implementation.

A standard budget amendment involves paying for a new thing or expanding paying for a thing that we're already doing and so to pay for it you need to find money from point A and place it in point B to do the thing.

Usually that means there's going to be a reduction to aid departments or a set of programs budget to increase to pay for the new thing.

Sometimes we'll earmark money within an existing budget and

and either create a new program to be paid for using that earmark or to expand something that exists already.

I think at a high level, that's the distinction.

And here we're just talking about earmarks that were a part of the budget, that's these 13 amendments that were paid for using earmarks instead of

Yeah, just another quick thing, Chair Chuktai, and just for staff.

Chair Chuktai, Council Member Wonsley, that funding was, we had to find it in the budget.

It was being used, so I'd have to go in and cut it from some other place within the CPED budget.

It was not, so then that's what it would mean.

It's being used for salaries, it's being used for programs, it's being used for inspection services, that's what it's being used for.

and in light of the rollover situation, we'd make some difficult decisions about what we're cutting and not cutting.

No, I actually am acting or asking for the opposite of that.

So what there would need to be in front of the body is saying we're not a budget amendment resolution that says we are asking to use this instead for fringe personnel as opposed to creating the FT.

But there needs to be a vote on a resolution that notes that change, even with the earmarks.

So I think this is a really good lesson of earmarks are also

All right.

My name is Tim Sexton, Public Works Director.

I'm going to be walking through some of the Council-directed spending updates for Public Works.

Starting with Zero Waste Project Manager, we had two related amendments.

One was to create a new position, Zero Waste Project Manager, and the second was to have a Zero Waste Work Group.

We've been working to create the position, the Zero Waste Project Manager role.

We did work with the Council Vice President to change the funding to the Climate Legacy Initiative so that that role could have an expanded scope.

which means it can work not just on residential units of four units or less but it could also work on commercial and multi-family residential so it would have an expanded scope rather than the initial budget proposal which was to come from solid waste and recycling funds which are restricted to the residential

sector only.

So we worked with the Council Vice President to make that change.

That position is with HR right now.

I think we're hoping to post in the next few weeks.

So we're making progress there.

We've been also working with the Clerk's Office to add the Zero Waste Work Group to the SEAC existing Community Environmental Advisory Commission

It already has a structure, it already has staffing, and so we've been working with the clerk's office to make that change.

So I would suggest that we are making progress on both of these items.

The second grouping has to do with sidewalks plowing pilots.

And actually, since this posted, we have new information that we're closer to $250,000 spent.

Now this sidewalk pilot, it's a little bit unique in that winter, as you know, it's at the beginning of our calendar year and at the end of the calendar year.

So the fact that we've spent about $250,000, I would suggest is very much on track for spending.

Just like I mentioned, this past year in December, we had some unplanned snow events.

So we don't want to be pushing up against that say like full 50% of the spend or we could run out of money in December of next year.

So we spent about, again, $250,000.

This walks through the different pilot areas that we've been working on throughout the year.

I'm happy to go into some more detail.

Thank you.

Are there any questions related to public works earmarks.

for the City of Minneapolis.

Up first is the Police Department off-duty fees.

The update that we have for that one, other than what was in the memo that was sent to Council on December 2nd, is that now we have an actual timeline for this to be started and you can see up there is estimated for second quarter of 2027.

Like has been explained in the email, we need to get a timekeeping platform together in as well as some of technology that is needed.

Thank you, Commissioner.

Thank you.

is essentially paying for salary, fringe, and an estimated amount of overtime for the members of the Minneapolis Police Department that are assigned to the non-fatal shooting team.

In addition to that, they are being supported and we're getting work from other law enforcement agencies that are participating, as well as we've started a violent offender

Apprehension Team that is also supplemented by outside law enforcement agencies so that as soon as there are suspects identified and that there are probable cause for arrests, those individuals can target them and get them off the street and make arrests as quickly as possible.

So the earmark for the Non-Fatal Shooting Task Force is completely accounted for.

Thank you.

Are there any questions for the Chief?

Thank you, Chair Chuk-Thai.

I'm very excited to see the implementation of the non-fatal task force.

I've sung the praises of that many times, and this is no commentary to you, but I do have some comments regarding the off-duty

of 2020-2024.

We are currently subsidizing this at $1.4 million.

Residents are subsidizing $1.4 million of making sure that MPD officers can essentially do their side gigs for personal gain, and that is not leading to citywide public safety outcomes.

and I know residents have made it very clear repeatedly that they would like to see us prioritize decreasing property taxes and actually taking 1.4 million dollars off of their shoulders could be a clear and obvious way to do that.

And it will allow the city to recoup said million dollars of costs without reducing any programs or services.

And I want to note that there is a real cost to delaying this work.

As you mentioned, we get off duty memos now as a result of council passing a measure.

to get those reports.

And through April of this year, MPD has stated that there's been 10,000 hours of off-duty work performed that the city has been subsidizing.

And that's almost nearly half a million dollars.

If we implement the fees that council passed just last year, we could be recouping nearly half a million dollars right now.

And I would just say this is absolutely a choice of political will.

I've seen the city, I've seen the Fry administration work magic.

to put things in place to do all sorts of things.

Make sure you know recovery is happening downtown and I just find it mind-boggling that we can't do the same to get essentially an app or whatever tech you need to actually get this implemented this year.

Council already put the policy measures in place for you to collect this fee.

We also as indicated by this presentation gave you over $300,000

to implement collection of

and alleviating financial burden and strain off of our residents and particularly especially when they're paying such a high degree for one department that this actually directly ties to.

We just heard nearly a 20 million dollars of spending.

We could take at least 1.4 million of that off the shoulders of residents and there is a choice by the prime administration to not do so and it makes absolutely no sense.

So this is one where I just have to say, like, do better.

There is no reason why you can't implement this fee this year and buy the technology.

And I would encourage the fire administration to do so.

So we're not in the same situation come next year, where it's just like, oh, we wasted a million dollars of taxpayer dollars for absolutely no reason.

Thank you.

Thank you.

My colleague laid out the case well enough, but I'd like to hear it from the Commissioner or from the Chief.

through the chair, Councilmember Stevenson.

My understanding is that as an enterprise, we're trying to implement timekeeping measures as well as the technology.

I think that memo from, I think it's December 2nd, kind of lays that out that went to all council members.

I know that there are also other

projects that's going on.

I hear Councilmember Wonsley loud and clear.

I will definitely take those concerns back and see what we can do to move things quicker.

I don't, through the Chair, Councilmember Stevenson, it's not a low priority for me.

I can, like I said earlier, I'll take it back and see where we are and what specifically as far as timelines that are out there.

I didn't ask for that specific thing.

I asked when do we think we would get it done.

So, when it comes to the technology piece, of course it's IT.

I believe also there's...

I believe the piece of timekeeping, I think, is a broader project for the enterprise that would create a new platform for us that

Okay.

Can I mark this for staff follow-up of understanding which departments need to move what in order for us to recoup these fees?

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah, and I just want to stress to you, you know, I had a large violence interrupter contract cut in my ward at Sabathany

This saves lives.

These are people's jobs.

This is super important stuff and it's because of overspending.

And now here we are, we have a way of recouping over a million dollars.

We gotta move on this.

Thank you, Chair, Chair, Commissioner.

You said that this is not a low priority for you.

Then who is it a low priority for?

Because I think what we want to know is then what we need to do to make sure this happens.

Through the Chair, Councilmember Chavez, like I said earlier, I'll take the concerns back and see if there's any way to move up the timeline.

Thank you.

I would love if we can move the timeline up.

The overspending here, does this have anything to do with the decrease in the recruiting budget from 2023 and 2024?

If we could increase the number of law enforcement officers that would help us with the overtime, which is a significant portion of why we've gone over budget.

Okay, thank you.

And so, um...

I think that that is something that we definitely need to work on because I've heard it stated several times I mean we can sit here and get upset about the fact that our officers are over budget or our police department goes over budget but should there be travesty, chaos, confusion or whatever else the case is because they're over budget doesn't mean that they all of a sudden don't show up

and I need them to show up.

So, Northside needs you to show up too.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair, Chuck Todd.

I'm actually, and you might not have these figures off hat, but what I'm recalling, we still had pretty significantly high overtime costs, even when MPD was closer to the charter minimum of over 800 officers.

Chair, Council Member, 2019, the police department spent over six million dollars in overtime, which I believe works out, and that was a fully staffed department, less serious cases.

Right, and I think you all are going to be presenting on this, well, a little bit more hyper-focused for this past year related to Operation Metro Search, but I think this is a larger conversation of even when MPD was closer to their charter amount versus even now, we've had a consistent problem for several years, over seven years, with

to take that off

Thank you.

took me a while to find this presentation.

Thank you to the council president for your assist on that.

But in early last year,

Or I want to say maybe in no this was in the summer of 2024 around this time there was Through the settlement agreement subcommittee a contract that was brought forward for an early intervention system and during that conversation the the subject of overtime came up and I see now exactly why it did because I'm looking at the slide deck and

and I see that one of the metrics that was at that time proposed as something that this early intervention system could assist in better tracking and quantifying in one centralized place was everything from calls for service but then it really looks at time worked and time used for individual employees specifically in the bucket of time used looking at sick

time, vacation time, but in time worked, really looking at regular hours, overtime, buyback, and then in addition off-duty and part-time external work, side gigs as we call them.

I think what I'm trying to reconcile in this conversation, and it has come up since this was approved two years ago, but really trying to understand why the early intervention system was an initially approved understanding.

Yes ma'am, Chair.

So I think the best way to think about the early intervention system is that it is the place that pulls data from several different siloed systems.

So it'll pull data from the police reports.

It'll pull data from what is now workforce director, which is the system the commissioner mentioned IT is changing over for the city.

It will pull that data from different places to analyze it and give warning flags, early warning flags, if you will, around any outliers or any concerns, anything that we preset into the system.

I just wanted to add some more information maybe regarding the comments made about the recruitment campaign money spent.

Maybe if there can be a follow-up memo.

My understanding is that the mayor kept talking about how the City Council cut money from the media recruitment campaign.

because the chief was talking about the early intervention.

We do need a way to bill.

Our billing process right now, we don't have a way with all of the sites and things like that in billing.

So that's a part of it separate from just knowing the hours, if that makes sense.

The early intervention system doesn't do that part.

To whoever can answer it.

gotcha so it would be really helpful if we can do an administrative follow-up just detailing then the the full budget for recruitment for the police department and what of that was was spent on what purposes or what recruitment activities there was literally leftover money after we were told that we defunded it so make it make sense

Yeah, just also level of urgency of following up on off-duty in relation to the last point made.

I know that there are numerous vendors out there in the

free market universe that have reached out and are excited to help the city figure out and go through our procurement process in this goal to help us be able to enact these fees and track them and build them.

We just have never done the work to put out a RFP to even reach those vendors.

So it's not a matter of like there's a lack of resources out in the communities for us to enact these fees.

There has been a lack of effort on our side to actually do the process, to bring the appropriate tools and vendors alone to actually save our taxpayers $1.4 million.

So I just wanted to highlight that.

And I thank you, Chair Chuck-Tye, for flagging.

We've been told repeatedly throughout several years now that technology was a top barrier towards implementing off-duty fees.

We've heard that for over four years, at least during my time.

And there's been no issue in getting technology as it pertains to the settlement agreement and things of that nature.

It should not be this much of a hassle.

When you have everything in place, you have the policies in place, you have the startup money in place, thanks to this council, to get these things done.

So I just want to name, it does not take NASA to come in and design an off-duty system for us.

Yeah, thank you, Chair Chugtai.

I just wanted to state around the question of, like, council funding recruitment and pathways, there are several ways that this body in the past have been a part of that.

There was the funding of higher wages so we can get more lateral recruits and then attract

other officers.

We also have funded MPD Pathways programs repeatedly and I see those as real tangibles and we have been able to get clear data that shows how those work.

As far as the PR campaign for recruitment, I remember this discussion well.

We had an amount that was funded I believe in the in the 2023 budget process and then there is another amount that was brought forward for about half $1,000,000 in the 2024 budget process and there were no

of the

the PR recruitment campaign that we were asked to put another half million dollars into and then we learned later on in the rollover process that initial amount that we did fund for the PR recruitment campaign had

a X amount of dollars left over and that was a topic of discussion that we had in this council.

We might have also done an administrative follow-up to get that number at some point, but I did want to just highlight that.

I really feel like the bread and butter parts of recruitment and retention, we have really put effort into

this body to make happen and it notwithstanding contention and I think that's worth holding up.

I think it's for me I think it's more powerful to have the higher wages and the Pathways Program than to rely solely on a PR recruitment campaign that showed had leftover funding for future years.

So I don't think that there is a real correlation between us deciding not to do that half million dollars when there was already money left over

and struggling with recruitment.

I think like it's there's several data points that shows that this is a difficult time across police departments to recruit new hires, and that's also why we've implemented this CSO program that has had a larger number of graduates every single year.

Thank you.

We will now continue to the Neighborhood Safety Department's section of this presentation.

We're coming near the end here.

Good afternoon.

Amanda Harrington, Director of Neighborhood Safety Department.

We have one earmark, which was focused on getting safety initiatives to Stevens Square neighborhood.

This council directive actually aligned really well with the goals of neighborhood safety, which was to use data to get services into neighborhoods that needed it, and Stevens Square showed up as one of the neighborhoods that needed that.

We had already at the same time Council Member Osman was working on this started to put services into Stevens Square and so we currently have a contractor that's in that area.

We are going to specifically use the $100,000 earmarked in this directive to ensure that services continue from July through the end of December.

Yes, it does.

Are there any questions for this neighborhood safety item?

Thank you, Deputy Director.

I appreciate you bringing forward.

I just want to overall talk about the Stephen Square.

Right now, Councilmember Schaefer is also part of that neighborhood.

I talked to the Chief many times about this neighborhood.

It's a much needed resource here.

I'm super glad.

that this is coming forward.

I've been screaming my lungs out for a long, long time to get Stephen Square and 18 and Nicolette some violence interrupters, some program here, so I appreciate your leadership on this and also I am just encouraging the city leaders, especially public safety, to really pay attention to this area.

and the City Council.

that I'm hoping the Chief and folks that are about public safety is really paying attention in this area.

So super glad.

Please continue to share with us when that will be so we can introduce to the businesses and then share with the neighbors that the service is coming forward.

So appreciate it again.

Thank you, Council Vice President.

Yes, I just wanted to say thank you to Councilmember Osment for bringing this forward last year and we're working hard as a team to try to bring the community together and set up some meetings to discuss what's going on and we appreciate your office's help in this whole area.

Thank you.

I'm not seeing anyone else in queue.

Thank you for this presentation and I will direct the clerk to file this report.

We're ready now to move to item number five on our agenda, which is related to administrative FTE ad

Memo Report.

For this presentation, I will invite Budget Manager Justin Carlson.

Good afternoon, Chair Chugtai, Vice Chair Schaefer, and members of the Budget Committee.

My name is Justin Carlson.

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

I'm here to present on the 2026 first quarter administrative FTE ads that were included in the summary memo and supporting documentation within the LIMS file.

Administrative FTE ads, also referred to as admin ads, are increases to a department's budget FTE count that is offset by an increase in revenues or an ongoing reduction in its non-personnel budget.

This report is presented in accordance with financial policies, specifically Policy 1.5.3, which addresses adding FTEs administratively.

This reporting of admin ads quarterly to Council was a change in financial policies as noted in bold on the slide to provide additional transparency on these increases to department budget positions outside of the annual budget process.

Admin ads in 2025 were also noted in the staffing section of each department page in the 2026 adopted budget book and we will continue to include them in the budget books moving forward.

In Quarter 1 of 2026, there were 13 FTEs added administratively, as shown in the slide.

I will briefly share each of these, and department staff are on hand to answer questions these FTEs include.

In the Arts and Cultural Affairs Department, one position in the General Fund, which was created by reducing the department's non-personnel budget for contractual temporary administrative support services to bring this work in-house, there was no change in programming.

In the Health Department, three positions in special revenue funds and two positions in the general fund.

The three special revenue positions are offset by grant revenues and funding for the two positions in the general fund was budgeted in contractual services in 2026, so this shifts the funding from non-personnel to the personnel budget.

This is related to the climate legacy initiative and franchise fee increase that was passed in December.

This formalizes the creation of two positions within this body of work.

In the IT department, one position in an internal service fund.

This position is offset by revenues from external partners who will be supported by this position along with a reduction to the non-personnel budget in IT and an increase to the technology charged to the 911 department.

This is a modification to the offset that is included in the supporting documentation in the LIMS file.

Previously, a portion of the offset was coming from the Fire and Police Department budgets.

This was changed to a greater portion being covered by 911 and using the IT budget, as these are better aligned with the work being done by the position and were determined to have adequate capacity to cover this expense.

In the Public Works Department, six positions in the Stormwater and Sewers Enterprise Funds, which are supporting work funded by the capital budget.

Finally, there was one position in the IT department not listed on this table as the department reduced its budget FTE count and increased its contractual services budget to better meet department needs.

I'll note that the table shows estimated 2026 salary and fringe cost which is based on the anticipated start date for the positions.

The full year cost of the position is offset to ensure the action is budget neutral in the current year per financial policy 1.5.3 and the offset is ongoing.

Thank you.

Mr. Carlson, as you've noted, this is a new report that we're receiving as part of a change to our city's financial policies, just to make sure that we are better tracking FTEs that are created administratively outside of the city's regular budget process.

Are there any questions on Mr. Carlson's presentation?

I am not seeing any, so thank you.

And I will ask the clerks to file this report.

With that we are ready to continue to our final item.

I anticipate there will be extensive discussion on this as well.

This is

regarding police overtime expenses during Operation Metro Surge.

It's a response to a legislative directive brought forward by the Council President.

I will invite Chief O'Hara to join us and begin this presentation.

Thank you, Chair.

That's a different one.

Good afternoon Chair.

I'm going to open it up and then I'm going to pass it off to go through the individual questions.

I'm going to pass it off to Deputy Chief Cluco, who's the Deputy Chief of Patrol and led the Incident Management Team throughout the surge so he can speak more specifically about some of these questions.

Obviously metro surge was an emergency for the police department and for the city and one of the most complex and sustained operations the police department has had to endure and was truly unprecedented.

There was no one single incident during the surge and for several weeks the city of Minneapolis

was on the precipice of having yet another incident that could push us off into the cycle that the city saw six years ago.

There was no defined beginning and for much of it there was just no end in sight.

It was a period of prolonged uncertainty.

There were several rapidly evolving situations and very significant public safety concerns, not just happening in the city, but public safety concerns that were stretching our outside law enforcement agencies around the metro.

So to meet these demands, we had to mobilize the entire department.

Several times there were days off canceled.

We recalled personnel back to duty, and we maintained a constant and heightened state of readiness for weeks.

That ultimately involved multiple times asking for the state patrol to have hundreds of troopers on standby for us, asking for the Minnesota National Guard to be on standby, and ultimately to deploy with us into the city.

There were real-time decisions made about deploying personnel continuously.

Our officers worked extended shifts.

They came in on their days off and several canceled vacations.

Standby assignments were utilized to ensure as rapid as a response as we could to unexpected emergencies.

And officers were essentially in a constant state of readiness and under very intense physical and mental pressure consistently.

At the same time we made very deliberate decisions to try and balance the constant and immediate operational needs with the long-term health and well-being of the officers, recognizing that we just could not sustain this forever.

In addition to receive mutual aid from our partner agencies, particularly from the state and others, we had to demonstrate that we were fully utilizing every member of the department.

That was required before we could even get state patrol and members of the National Guard to be on standby.

So while there was no clear end point, no ability to scale down safely, and there was certainly no margin for failure,

Thanks Chief, Chair, Members of the Council.

and during this event I was the incident commander for most of the time unless I was going to sleep and then pass off for a few hours, come back in.

So my familiarity is very unique and I should be able to answer most of your questions.

I'll get to the legislative directive by Council President Payne.

Department-wide, what is the average cost of overtime?

Before we get into that, I'll just do these definitions that we set up to level set for you all, how we define overtime.

Overtime in the department is when someone works over 40 hours in a week, then it's overtime.

It's not quite as simple as that, because we schedule in four-week increments, but when people are basically outside of their schedule, then they come in, it's overtime.

Other things that we define include standby time at .50 and that as we talk about here it's half the employee's rate and the folks are put on this

this version of Standby because they're uniquely skilled to and they've been trained uniquely to respond with with gear and we call those folks mobile field force strike team the bicycle teams those folks are I'm gonna just kind of ballpark at about 140 officers that have one of those unique skills that we bring in to help us mitigate

These large threats that we are either anticipating or currently experiencing, they have to be fully uniformed in the city and operating within 60 minutes.

And they're at home, that's what 0.5 standby time.

0.25 standby time, I want to also say that is not used very often.

That 0.5 standby time, it's not being used right now.

It's not used unless we're in these moments like Operation Metro Surge.

And then standby time, that is something, in some cases it's contractual, it's someone like the FAST team investigators at home and somebody gets shot, they get called in quickly so they can respond quickly to that scene and start the investigation.

Homicide, some of our also uniquely skilled but more uniquely trained, they do that .25 work.

That is currently, there'll be people on .25 tonight.

Okay, so estimated cost, this is with fringe that our personnel, we have 47 lieutenants and that is their average overtime costs, their .5 rate and their .25 rate.

That was one of the specific questions.

And then you see we do have our officers as well and our sergeants.

This is one of the reasons why when we try to estimate costs we struggle because all three of those civil service ranks

do more or less, they have .5 standby time, .25 and they also come in for overtime and of course when we call everybody in, everybody comes in and they're not necessarily going into a managerial role just because they're a lieutenant.

Sometimes we'll put that person on a line because they have a unique skill.

This was the question posed by President Payne.

What was the total amount of spent on overtime 0.25 and 0.5 standby during OMS?

Please specify for each.

Gets into the weeds here and I certainly should go over this whole slide but it's available and we can break that down if you'd like.

There are multiple slides that are answering the questions that look like this.

Here's another one that was a total amount spent on overtime.

Standby for the six weeks preceding Rene Good's murder.

For purposes at this point, I think it's important to note that we didn't use the 0.5 standby time until Renee Goode's murder.

That was the 7th of January.

That's when we had to bring people in against their will as well as after the four or five days, I think it was the 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th.

And then on the 12th, we took the chance to not call everybody in and see if we could do it with standby time rather than have everybody

Some of these slides are in the deck and you all have access to them.

I'm hoping you would ask about how many hours of overtime 0.5 and 0.25 standby were logged each week, respectively, and it goes week by week here.

How many hours were logged each week during the six weeks preceding Renee Good's murder?

And you can see the numbers are lower.

.25 were the ones, those are the hours that we use as an operational element.

And .5, very rare.

So we get into a breakdown of how many hours of overtime and standby.

This histogram is a little bit complex, but if I could help you kind of through it.

It shows by number of hours how many officers worked, let's say, 10 to 20 hours of overtime.

If you'll look over on the second

line in, 28 officers worked between 10 and 20 hours of overtime.

And then as we go through it, 649 worked between 20 and 30, and it goes down the line.

And then the standby time is the other graph on the deck, and that talks more about the standby time.

You'll see that 0 to 25 officers were put on this, 342 officers.

And then as we go across that histogram on the

Lower side, you'll see that 140 officer number that I was referencing with those skills that either they're SWAT, Strike, BERT.

They're uniquely skilled because they're part of my team, the incident management team.

They have skill with planning or logistics.

Those folks were put on standby and those make up the rest of the numbers on the far right of this slide.

This goes right to the dates that we were using standby and overtime, how many occasions were NPD officers on standby called in.

And you can see it does correlate with the death of Renee Goode on the 7th and those days that we came in, of course on the 12th, 13th.

we thought we were through that, we thought we were done with this episode of chaos and on the 14th that was the Solis, sorry I forgot his name, the man that was shot on the north side, 24th and Lindale

and 14th, 15th, 16th, that's when we were balancing it and then of course on the 17th is when we lost Alex Preti.

And then that indicated that we were still going to be in a loss of control when it comes to what we were worried about, 26th and Nicollet, some of the events we were managing included.

folks that were legal lawfully protesting and then also people that were using the cover of the thousands and thousands of legal lawful protests to damage things in the city and

go to the hotels and block the streets and those sorts of things that we would all remember that were highly publicized.

As we drift through January, we were still seeing quite a bit of activity from the federal government with regard to their federal law enforcement activity and I think some close in there, the 23rd we had the vice presidential visit.

We used, as we always do in Secret Service, asks for assistance to help with their protectees.

And then as it goes beyond that, we had lots of those barricades in those situations.

And of course we were on the precipice of another event at any moment.

We finally kind of realized in February we were going to be out of the dark.

That's when, for the most part, a lot of this overtime use and the questions that President Payne posed, I think summed up.

Although there is another question here.

The total number of days off canceled for the 10 months prior, March through December, in the escalation, and there were no days off canceled.

And that's a severe thing when we cancel days off.

Every officer who is available is called in and has to come in

whether they're on standby or not.

They don't have that 60 minute window.

They just need to come to work as soon as possible.

And some folks are on life duty status or they're on parental leave or something.

Those folks we wouldn't bring in, but we didn't have to use that for the 10 months prior.

and then the overtime costs since February 8th.

As you can see, there's some good news in here.

We have been putting quite a few measures in to limit the use of overtime as a police department and I think that's a discussion that we certainly can have.

We are trending down in the overtime use.

I think the 2026 numbers were recently talked about.

But that answers question nine.

And then the final question here, please provide an additional histogram chart that includes all hours worked during this time.

This does not include the regular duty hours, the hours that our employees have.

We just know that everyone works 2,080 hours a year.

So we left it off this slide for obvious.

And then it trends the same way as that prior slide in which some folks had more standby time than others because of their

their unique skill and related to what we were dealing with.

Alright, thanks.

Thank you for that presentation.

colleagues, are there any questions?

I will first recognize Councilmember Bitton.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you.

Deputy Chief.

Deputy Chief.

Thank you, Deputy Chief Kukau for the presentation.

Just a couple quick questions.

The first one is about, you said people get

Councilmember Vitale, through the Chair, I will answer that as soon as they're in and ready is when their time converts from 0.5 to 1.5.

Because they're in and ready, they're in the city deployable.

Okay, so is there a minimum amount of time that they have to serve on that call-in shift, or is it just like if something happens, they leave after an hour, you figure out what you thought was going to happen isn't happening?

I understand the question, Councilmember, through the Chair.

The answer is the minimum four hours is by contract if they're called in.

And then they don't have an end time, although we prefer to find a way to get them out of service as soon as possible.

or 16 hours.

If we're going to use them for too long, we know they won't be usable at all for us again.

I think I have the answer for you, Councilmember, through the Chair.

The answer for any person in the department, a sworn officer, a sworn person in the department, we have hours worked limits that includes no more than 160 in a two-week period.

Okay, I think I understand.

And that applies to this too.

I will clarify if during the time that you come in, you were involved, let's say there was an officer on scene when Rene Good was murdered and somehow was involved in that.

His or her life was also threatened with deadly force.

That would qualify as a critical incident, although that event is a critical incident in general language the way we define it in our

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you for the detailed expenses.

That must have taken a long time.

That's very thorough.

And I just wanted to give you a compliment, Inspector Peterson, Shane Zahn, the day that during the high, high tensions, very cold out, that influencer Jake Lane came into town, the guy who burned the Quorum, and he was going to march to the West Bank.

whatever he wanted to do.

In fact, Vice President Osman and I, we saw each other down there.

You had, and Inspector Peterson had the vision and foresight to go into the West Bank and assure the residents going into the apartments and the coffee shops and the constitutional observers that MPD was there to help, to protect, to serve.

You had your blue shirtsville, you took your jackets off

you calmed everything down for people who were very scared so that was, and I wrote about that in my newsletter and the feedback I got about the brilliance of that simple move that kindness of walking in the West Bank and reassuring people that the Minneapolis Police Department was there to protect them

That was really good.

The second thing I want to do is just Chief, you don't have to come up, but just overall the compliments I've gotten about the big difference between the Minneapolis Police Department and the federal agents that came here.

Tremendous.

So all these years of the training, the last five years,

and the leadership from the whole department.

It's just showed off and it really, you guys shine.

Thank you Councilmember, through the Chair, yep, appreciate that.

I wish we could have done more.

I'm looking at the histogram on page 9 and just trying to look at these outliers.

One is 500 to 525 hours of standby time.

Council Member, through the Chair, Council President, that is, I did anticipate this question, that was the overall leader that we needed to have constantly available.

Council President, that is different, a different person, and actually that person is often an outlier.

So he manages to stay within the boundaries of the work policy, but is working as many hours as he possibly can.

And most of the time it's not related to Operation Surge.

It was 911 events and 911 calls.

And then I was curious, you know, in particular for the standby, how does being on standby interact with those requirements of eight hours off every 24 hours?

Because I mean, clearly every working hour or every waking hour, this one person was on standby so that but they weren't utilized for all of those hours of standby.

Council President, through the Chair, the answer to that is that people will be offered the opportunity to be on standby, and they have to self-select into standby.

We can't force them into it based on what they're doing with their life.

And then they have to balance

their hours worked with the policy so if they do get called in and we use them for a 16-hour span that wasn't in their planning they have to find a way within that two-week period to get out of other obligations that they've committed to sometimes that is important work so they have to be careful with how they bid to get into those to get into that standby time and then also somewhat estimate how much

they will be called in and and it happened in a couple of situations where they had to also finish their work with other folks time because they could they would be outside the boundaries of I think I missed one question there was how does point five reconcile with active work yeah that's the

If you're on .5 standby and you don't get called in, that is bedding down.

We don't count that against their week's time.

We count the time that hours worked policy means hours worked.

okay and then maybe just a follow-up on this one outlier that's like working to the maximum level possible just out of curiosity is this uh later in the career looking for high five is this an earlier in the career and just they have a

I did it last year.

So yeah, it's end of your career.

You're attempting to do as much work as you can to reconcile your retirement for the rest of your life.

Thank you.

I have very similar questions to the Council President.

I'm less concerned with the one outlier as going back a couple, so looking at 450 to 475, there's 12 officers who, that's, sorry, same histogram, sworn officers, total standby time.

Looking at 450 to 475, there were 12 officers who met that amount of time, and across 32 days,

that's 14 hours of standby time a day.

Can you just help me understand these numbers?

Councilmember, through the Chair, can you give me the question it's answering?

Okay, sorry.

So I'm pulling out under sworn officers total standby time.

on the far right there, there's, well, third in from the far right is 450 to 475.

There's 12 officers who are at 450 to 475.

If you take 450 divided by 32, that's just less than 14 hours a day of standby time.

and the number 32 that you got 32 through the dates yeah that we're studying that's the 7th of January to the 8th of February understood understood

Okay, I'd be guessing.

I don't have a specific answer, but I do believe that in situations in which we are in trouble as a city, we make exceptions to the hours worked policy.

All of those exceptions have to come up to our office.

They all have to be in an email format so we have record of it.

I was doing most of the exceptions.

When I would see another officer come in who had recently had an exception, then I would say, nope, not this time.

Because I was worried about managing the overall health and rest of all the personnel that were assisting us.

Okay, so during emergency times there's the capability to Suspend some of the hours worked Rules in order to meet Needs.

That's correct okay, and so then

In this case, you were saying it was you.

That's correct.

And then I would check in with their supervisor.

I'd say, please make sure you manage the health and rest of this employee.

That was kind of my pat every single time I had to do that.

And those were really the tough times were post Preti's murder and I think post the Solis shooting.

Those were the ones where we were really struggling to maintain and we actually, you know, we missed a couple of things that we shouldn't have missed and it was because we were trying to bed people down, get them rest, get them away from wearing this uniform for periods of time and it cost us.

Home to home suites is one example.

Okay, thank you.

I have another question.

Certainly, yes.

The officers that weren't on the specialized groups, so some of the non-outliers, but we did have people called in, we would put them into what we'd call strike teams groups that could respond to a problem that was boiling up.

We'd put them in, they're non-specialized, although they have riot gear, they could get

Councilmember Rainville

We really wanted to flood that area, that neighborhood on that day, also around City Hall because we had also similar threats around City Hall related to that influencer.

So we do coordinated work with everybody in those situations.

We'd also put them two at a time in a hotel, throughout the hotels that experienced threats, whether it was online threats or real or perceived.

so that our hotel guests and frankly we have a lot of relationships with our hotel managers and folks that work in those hotels that they were being penetrated nightly by folks who wanted to disturb whether or not there were federal law enforcement at that hotel.

It seemed to be the hotel thought they were vulnerable.

we certainly didn't know where everybody was staying and we couldn't reconcile any of it so we put officers in those places we also had them we would ready them just in case there was something that went sideways in the demonstrations the damage to properties make sure the fire department was safe and then of course the 911 service takes up a large chunk of our personnel every day

and although I don't think 9-1-1 really went through the roof during this period, I think it was just a little bit more.

Okay.

So, during Operation Metro Search, what I'm hearing you say is that the way that overtime was spent was on officers being in different strike groups ready to deploy throughout the city.

If I look at all my detailed plans in retrospect, I can come up with a dozen other things that we used people for.

We didn't like the idea of the personnel coming in and not being of service to the community in some way.

Infrastructure protection, we would give them details to make sure that they had almost a secondary purpose if we did call them in.

their primary purpose would be to quickly respond to something if it happened.

Secondarily, we'd give them these other assignments to make sure that they were active and ready to go.

Because we knew that quick response to all three of the major events that we know about, but then quick response to the demonstrations or some needs that we have, whether it was helping with the roads, monitoring cameras to make sure that

Some of these amazing demonstrations that occurred started very close to here.

They moved through the city to make sure that safety was maintained.

We would use the personnel in that regard.

Well, we're going to keep you over here just in case traffic finds a way through.

They had great road guards, but we weren't confident.

Every demonstration was going to go as well as it did, to be honest.

And Frank,

The demonstrations brought road guards.

They communicated with us.

We would send out a liaison team to go out, and in some cases I would be that person, to talk with the leader of the demonstration to make sure that they felt comfortable if they needed assistance.

Okay.

Maybe this is a good thing to mark for staff follow-up of a more detailed report about what activities were being done over time.

Throughout Operation Metro surge.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you, Deputy.

I appreciate it.

I don't have any questions, but I do really want to talk about the workload that the NPD was given, right?

We're talking about the extra time here, but I do want to recognize what has happened in our city.

This was something that was extreme, and I

want to, you know, give what the Curtis do, which the chief and police, they were not just responding to this massive, you know, extreme events that were taking place, but they also kept the departments going.

They were answering other 911 calls, what was it, like 500, 5,000, 50,000 calls, or something like that, so

I do want to say that, you know, you stepped in, I remember when Rene Goode was murdered, I remember his chief being right dead in the middle and officers trying to, you know, bring calmness to the situation where you have over 200

Federal agencies that were not communicating with you.

They were not communicating with you.

They were not telling you where you were coming.

And I just want to thank every officer who spent extra time keeping our residents safe, responding to the threats of federal government, and handling yourself in the most professional way.

I think all the residents that came with their whistles

You know, were amazing.

Our city did not just, you know, really overcome the threats, but our officers were amazing.

And I do want to thank you and the police leadership for your work.

And let me just say this, it's something that never happened in our city.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Chogtai, and I forgot to ask this question.

So the chief said, you know, if you did the math on the 2019 overtime, which would be kind of maybe like a reasonable baseline, there'd maybe be some I couldn't remember was like 900 and some FTE equivalent hours of work.

So that suggests that, you know,

If we had no financial constraints, but we just have our people constraints, other than how many more outliers would there be of people willing to work the maximum amount of overtime possible?

At some point, you have to say no.

And I'm curious what that approval process looks like.

So you talked a little bit about you signed off on certain exceptions.

But when it comes to that big picture,

is it the mayor, is it the commissioner, is it the chief, is it your role, like what's that decision making process of actually we do need to activate this over time, this is a moment of crisis and I mean obviously during metro surge, I mean I remember going down there the morning that Renee was killed and that felt like a moment of crisis and it was very understandable why you would have a lot of officers activated.

Council President through the Chair

In a moment like that, we know we need everybody possible because we know we're also going to need additional folks.

So that question is posed quickly and it comes right from the chief.

Everybody's coming in, make it happen, and then we spin up everything we have.

And it's not enough, but it needs to happen in order for us to get help from State Patrol and our other partners in the county and Metro Transit and the suburbs.

So that's that.

So we have been pretty aggressive in the past few months ever since this occurred in trimming overtime costs and those decisions are the administration coming right from the chief again that we are dialing down this trend needs to go downward.

So, and I think we're getting close to that.

I mean, I know we are.

We're watching Director Troswick bring up material that we know we're making a big difference and diminishing the use of overtime to operate the police department.

In 2019, we used 400,000 more hours of police time than we're going to use this year.

if we just talk about hours, because dollars is difficult to compare the two seven years apart.

But we're on trend for that.

I think all of these matters are just judgment calls.

Obviously a lot of these decisions have to land on your shoulders and you just have to use your wisest judgment to make the right call.

Being on site for some of these events, whether it was on the north side, the day Renee was killed, the day that Alex Pardee was killed, it didn't take some sage genius to recognize the moment that we were in, that it was a moment of crisis where all hands needed to be on deck.

But I think I'm trying to understand

when we're not in that moment, right?

What is the deliberative process that you have for making some of these decisions of, because I'm trying to connect the metro surge, what I think everybody viscerally understood the moment that we were in, but now I'm trying to layer that into the, you know, significant overage that we went last year where

Yes chair council president

So just to be clear, during the emergency of Operation Metro Surge, the public safety operational needs were the priority and not the policy.

And I know you mentioned those three shootings.

Part of the other issue as trying to communicate earlier, all three of those were unexpected.

When Rene Goode was killed, it was the morning on a weekday.

So we have investigators working over there.

We got people in training.

We got the people in the office.

There are people available and had everyone in uniform.

So we had people that were at work that we could put them out on the street.

When Mr. Sosa was shot, Sosa Celis was shot on the north side, it was the evening.

and we didn't have any, you know, intel that there were going to be marches or demonstrations or something at a hotel.

And we were unable to get help fast from outside agencies.

And a similar kind of thing happened that Saturday morning when Mr. Preti was shot.

So it was...

The difference between 2020 and this thing

was we were constantly on the precipice of just something else happening that was just gonna push us off the cliff.

So the priority was on the operational need.

getting past that now what I think you're saying for the day-to-day stuff generally does not come to me the expectation is we are going to follow the policy there are certain times there's operational issues that it's to me it's just common sense you know we have homicide investigators that get called in they need to continue working the case depending on what the evidence is

that's what's going to happen.

We have officers that are out on a scene that need to stay an extended period of time because the scene is involved and we have other emergencies you know happening elsewhere in the city that's that's the expectation.

But it should be happening less and less as we continue to build up our capacity with Sworn.

But metro surge

So if I were to say that, make sure I'm understanding it correctly, on a day-to-day basis the policy is driving these decisions and it's not even showing up on your desk as a choice to make.

And when we step outside of those

So then, you know

in the year preceding metro surge where we did end up in this pretty significant overage in overtime.

There was no, it seemed to me that like the operational needs were driving those outcomes more than any policy necessarily.

And I'm just curious

Chair, Council President, there's specific things we can lay out why the overage occurred.

you know the overtime budget each of the last couple years the line for overtime has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller and that's why that's why email you every week has gotten even smaller this year

and for example like for this year through the different managerial controls we have in place we've cut back very significantly I would estimate we're gonna have about one-third less overtime hours this year one-third less even considering that metro surge happened because there's a lot of things that we've done to try and drive that down

But the reality is we still have a problem with the budget continuing that way.

The main driver of that is the lack of a financial plan to account for the hiring that's been made.

That was the problem last year when we talked about it.

It's still the problem this year.

Even reducing overtime, getting rid of double time, the critical staffing overtime, cutting back about a third of hours of overtime.

That's what we anticipate this year.

We still have the issue that we have, we don't have the vacancy savings we used to have year after year post 2020 when we just kept going down in sworn members and we had a much higher overtime line, but we had all the vacancy savings.

The problem last year is the same as the problem this year.

We no longer have the vacancy savings.

We have the most community service officers we ever had.

We've added an entire new class of cadets, so we hire cadets in additional class each year, but we still have operational vacancies.

and we just don't have the funding for it.

So those questions going forward, yes, there have been meetings, there are regular meetings with OCS and with the mayor's office because we have the same problem for this year that we had last year.

I think that implementing some of these controls is going to help

I think

and the City Council.

Thank you.

Next I'll recognize Councilmember Vitor.

Chief, you might have answered this in Councilmember Payne's questions, but I'm trying to get to the bottom of who calls the overtime.

So the incident you brought up in North Minneapolis, right?

There was an incident, it was at night.

folks came in and then there's a lot of aftermath following that.

It doesn't end that day.

There's days and days and days of stuff that happens that spiraled out of that one event.

Chair, Councilmember, thank you.

It starts with me.

While I was driving up Lindale Avenue, after I called the BCA, I called the State Patrol and honestly, you know, honestly was scared because there just there weren't that many troopers available.

You know, we spoke with the Sheriff's Office.

They also had commitments.

Our neighboring towns

neighboring communities were willing to assist answering 911 calls.

They were not willing to come to a scene like the scene in North Minneapolis.

And they were only able to do it when they had the staffing and their call volume allowed it.

So it was very, very unpredictable.

And then, as you mentioned, there were other things that happened after that as a result that kept happening.

So I guess I'm trying to understand, after the incident started, did you make the call for overtime for that day?

Chair, Council Member, I assembled the incident management team who came to, we were running the command post downtown, got everybody in, and I said to recall everyone that we could.

Everybody that could pick up the phone, because it was an emergency.

And we just, I knew we were not going to get the help, a sufficient amount of help from other agencies.

Yeah, that was my call.

Chair, Council Member.

So that will play out through the Incident Management Team at not just North Minneapolis to bring people in from the 4th Precinct, but they need to be supported by everybody.

so then do they get like assignments specifically to the north side or is it just kind of like a we need the specialty team to help with an investigation of what happened versus like someone at me because that area was

it was in a bad way for some days and I mean I don't remember if it was Fourth Precinct or whomever but like in the morning I went over like five in the morning there was Public Works was there cleaning up all the trash because they there was like trash all over the street so

Thank you.

Thank you Chair Choctaw.

I think this is probably a question just kind of walking through for D.C. Cluco, particularly as it relates, and sorry if this is a little elementary, just trying to get a better understanding of how you all go about your methodology.

It's a little different than that.

It's close, but we schedule them in 28 day increments, and that's four weeks.

And sometimes they might be scheduled for six days in a given week.

So those 60 hours, because they're 10 hour shifts, they would all be on regular duty time.

We call it reg duty.

and the City Council.

300, 310 on limitation to work.

You can't work more than 160 hours total in a pay period.

And then if they do that, that exemption goes to whoever the chief's designee or the DC in that case.

Chair Choctaw, Council Member, no, that particular exception of the three main work rules wasn't invoked very often.

Perfect, thank you.

Chair, Chair and Council Member, there were more than I was comfortable with.

That's why I was concerned with it, so we definitely operationally could justify it, but I wanted them to go down.

Yeah, and I guess from your perspective, having been on the force for a while, is this something, and it sounds like you just noted it, in the 2019 numbers, we are going to surpass, what, 400,000 officer hours comparatively.

Perfect.

That is helpful.

That's all I have.

Thank you.

And then I just have a couple questions for you, Deputy Chief.

I appreciate that you break out the different definitions of overtime and that 0.5 standby means that you need to be ready and you have to respond, be fully equipped to do your job within 60 minutes.

Council Chair that is the same the same number the expectation is that are quicker and in some of those 0.25 situations really it's really frowned upon if they take the full hour to get there because they don't need the equipment they don't need that resourcing that a like like a strike team officer would need they really just

need the skills that we've trained them with to get to the scene of a shooting as quick as they can.

yeah that's helpful to know and then I actually I found I really want to compliment you on on the the histograms that that look at over time and standby hours worked over the the course of time and really detailing out what number of officers is working the

the state of, or really add some context to overtime costs in the 32 days from January 7th through February 8th that are included here which I think lines up with about five work weeks.

based on the charts that you've provided in your presentation.

Something that isn't necessarily for you to answer here but has really struck me in this discussion, in this presentation, is the volume of officers that

were compensated some amount of standby pay and how significant those standby hours were.

So for 118 officers, they worked somewhere between 250 and 475 hours of standby over those 32 days.

That's significant to me because for 118 officers they were being compensated for standby pay for somewhere between 8 and 14 hours every single day from January 7th through February 8th.

Right.

Put that into the numbers that you give us in one of your earliest slides about the breakdown of hourly pay and then the average rate for 0.5 standby, the average rate for 0.25 standby.

We don't know in the histograms that you've provided which one of those twelve people that worked between 450 and 475 hours or were compensated 450 to 475 hours of standby pay, which are at the rank of officer, which are at the rank of sergeant, which are at the rank of lieutenant.

But there are 118 officers who received somewhere between

just using their hourly rates provided by you.

Somewhere between $8,000 and $20,000 worth of standby pay in one month alone is like

That's astronomical.

That's insane.

I can't think of a better word other than insane to describe just the standby pay received.

Just to be ready to work, you receive $20,000 over the course of one month, not for actual work done.

That is mind boggling.

I don't have anything else to say so I want to thank members of this committee and for your patience as we went through a very lengthy agenda.

I want to thank the members of the police department that came in right at the beginning of this committee and are still here to make sure we got through your item.

With that I will ask the clerk to file this report and seeing no further business to come before this committee, we stand adjourned.