Finance Committee - Regular Meeting

Two minutes until we're going. Something? Meeting of the finance standing committee is called to order at 08:31AM on April 22. Happy Earth Day, everybody. At this time, I'll entertain a motion to sorry, first I got to do a roll call. Alderman O'Neill, you're here? We can't hear you, but I can tell you were saying present. Alderman Thorpe, you're here? Present. Alright. I'm here. Is there a motion to approve the agenda?

So moved.

Alright. Second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. And, Kayla, we have notes from yesterday. Right? Okay. So, it's our motion to approve the minutes from yesterday's meeting. So moved. Second. All those in favor say aye. Aye. All right. Ms. Garrity, floor is yours.

The way we normally do this is you have fifteen minutes for your presentation. We'll try to interrupt you as little as possible. Might just ask some little questions for clarity and then we'll go through and each one of us have questions. We'll start with auto reverend O'Neill, Alderman Thorpe, me, anybody else in the room who needs to ask a question, any questions that I've been emailed from other council members, and we'll try and be wrapped up on time. So, Kaylee, can you put fifteen minutes on the timer? Yep. Thank you very much. You're up.

Alright. Good morning. Hi. My name is Neely Garrity. I am the chief of staff for the mayor's office.

So I'm just gonna go over our top three accomplishments to date for fiscal year twenty six. Number one is just the increased mayor's community engagement and this is the first four months of since the mayor has been put into office. We've done events such as town halls, ward walks, and office hours reaching over 500 residents. We've also conducted staff roundtables and hear from the staff touching over 350 staff members. Constituent services, we have a full time constituent services person who started in March and you can just not gonna go over all these stats but she's been hard at work.

Number two accomplishments just strengthening and expanding the mayor's communications. Not gonna go over all these stats. We have obviously a presence on social media, put out a lot of press releases, do broadcasts almost daily, ceremonial things. We've been pushing out weekly newsletters from the mayor's office. We do anywhere from five to you know a ton of speeches every week, a lot of graphic design, and then also just responding to media inquiries.

Number three, just our direct impact in the community. I'm just gonna kind of briefly just talk about our outreach teams. We have an African American outreach team, who recently did a black history month speaker series reaching over 8,000 people online and 300 people in person. We had over 4,000 attendees at our El Malkay parade and festival which happened recently. Our no harm outreach team has connected with over 1,400 residents, a 100 youth, and 14 different communities across the city.

Our NAM team has delivered six opioid prevention workshops and I just want to highlight there that our overdoses for the city are down 55% and I think it has a lot to do with the work that that team, who is one person, is doing. Our Hispanic outreach team attends a lot of events, hosts a lot of events, does a lot of case management as well, has done over seven eighty cases, and then also a lot of marketing online and directly to the Hispanic community. So performance measures, since December '25 since we came into office, we're starting to track our impact. All events we're requiring our team to track the number of events that they're doing and also the attendance at these events so then we can evaluate whether those events need to continue in the next next fiscal year. So what I laid out here is just some performance measures that we have started to measure and next year when we put in our budget we will put in benchmarks for the mayor's office to be part of the performance measures.

Alright budget enhancements. We have asked for two personnel enhancements. The challenge that we face for these two different positions that we're asking for is currently the structure within the mayor's office is just stretched beyond our capacity and I know I've already talked to a lot of you guys, and presented on this particular position a deputy chief of staff. Really the deputy chief of staff is gonna be a senior advisor that oversees key policy portfolios. An example that I gave was housing.

Also, just support the chief of staff and the mayor to just make sure that we are set up for success and also be a point person for all city council and intergovernmental relations, which we do a lot of. I just wanted to point out that the mayor in the city of Annapolis is the executive. So they're not just a ceremonial thing. So we have a lot of demands coming into the office, high profile people we're meeting with and a lot of government relations that happens. And then we have huge projects like CityDoc and C and I coming down the pipeline.

So I the deputy's chief of staff is just a practical step to help build up the mayor and make him successful in Annapolis Works. And then the other challenge that we have is our current comms team, our PIO, is overextended and can't you can't really sustain what this one person is doing. She works a ton of hours and especially during emergencies there's really no backup, PIO which is just, very hard to deal with and exhausting, hard to recover from. So what we would like to do is the current assistant PIO is actually a contract position and by being a contract position you are unable to work you know if an emergency happens you can't work over thirty five hours So so we lose that backup support. So converting them into a full time position would allow some flexibility and backup.

Just before you go on to the next slide, I just have to jump in with one thing that our attorneys love to remind me that the Choice Neighborhood Initiative is not our project, it's Hawkins project.

Thank you for clarifying that. Okay. Non personnel enhancements. One of the biggest challenges is currently we don't have a strategic plan. So we are proposing a solution of bringing on strategic consultants to do a survey with the residents and create a collective agenda.

And this collective agenda is gonna be not just the residents, it's gonna be the staff, all the input that we got from the staff roundtables, and set a clear vision including achievable priorities, as well as long term strategies that eventually we can tie to our budget and have performance measures that are tied back to this collective agenda that everybody agrees this is what the city should be focusing on. So those would be outside consultants. We also our comms team as I mentioned before lacks the bandwidth to really focus on the long term comms planning. So what we are proposing is bringing in a communications consultant, who would add bandwidth to that team and help kind of prioritize the the bigger picture, comms plans that we need. You know there's city doc stuff going on, transportation stuff we're always adding and upgrading.

Another example is our website upgrade, helping make sure that we are doing the business requirements and thorough review with all the partners. You need somebody leading that effort, so that's another kind of area where that communications consultant will come in. And then the third one listed is just historically we haven't really tapped into private giving networks in the city, so we're proposing a philanthropist consultant who would help identify potential donors, craft compelling fundraising campaigns where we could build in addition to the funding that we get from our taxpayers outside investments into our infrastructure. And then our revenue from the PEG funding, this was an additional ask from the TV studio to cover PEG funding. If you're not familiar, our PEG funding comes from cable television and over time they're they're making less more less money so that means we're bringing in more month less money so that PEG fund every year we're decreasing the amount of money we're getting from that.

So that was an investment asked for to increase that funding. And just to clarify that funding is used for equipment stuff so like all of the new mics for example in this room came from PEG funding. Non personnel enhancements, the challenge that we run into the current capabilities in in civic plus to do a newsletter, they don't really meet the needs that we need, the formatting is not great, There's a lot of things that are just clunky and not user friendly, so we've been using constant contact. So we would like to add that into our budget and it's for $1,200. I mean, we're sending out newsletters on a weekly basis, sometimes more.

Another challenge that we have line two is just the staff being overwhelmed by communications from residents so we need a better way to manage all of the inquiries that are coming in. IndiGov is a software that is part of Granicus and Granicus is already something that the city government uses so this will help improve our response capacity just responding to resident requests. It's like a central inbox, better management, case tracking, you can assign, track, assign, the resident can review it and assign it to different departments. So that is what Indigov is. The third platform that we're proposing, so this is all software, the city's primarily platform what I've noticed is, where we do our work is email.

And you know going back and forth on email you have to find something, you have to go back to the email which isn't a great tool for collaboration and communication internally. So what we are asking to do is pilot a tool called Slack and that's for internal government communication. It will allow us to coordinate better. It will break down silos between departments. There's also a whole task management system.

We do use, Google Workspace right now, but Google Workspace versus Slack are different. Google Workspace is more for productivity. It's great for sharing documents. But as far as tracking work and assignments, you come out of a meeting, you have action items, everybody writes it down in the notebook and you're assuming that they're taking those actions. This would allow us to put it in a tool like Slack and track it and get pinged when you're you're due for something that you signed up for and also allow people to go in and check the status of stuff instead of emailing for updates or updating spreadsheets on information.

So it's kind of like a central portal for internal communication. And then the last one is just the city's lacking a way to systemically, involve the public in decision making. And so another software that's an add on to Granicus is called Engage headquarters and this allows you to get actual community input, run surveys, forums, polls, and you turn it into usable data so that usable data would help us make better decisions about where we're prioritizing and responding to the residents' needs. Okay, so I just wanted to kind of put this in like a high level what does this mean particularly the software that I'm asking for. So the simplest way to think about these softwares is the constant contact is outbound communication.

It's the government talking to the residents. So this is how we're handling mass communication like newsletters. Indigov is how we're dealing with inbound inquiries. Right now it's being done in spreadsheets. Residents are coming to us, we need a way to handle the resident request. So this is like a case casework management. Slack, you can think of slack as internal communication. So staff to staff talking about things that need to get done, and handling internal coordination on, various initiatives and issues that we have. And then engage headquarters, you think about it as feedback. So residents shaping our decisions that we make government and it's just a way for us to pull public input, in a formalized way.

So I like to say this is a shift to modernizing our tools, right, setting our staff up for success, making us move to a digital government and the cost of all those softwares is less than $60,000. So you can see, over time, our budget has gone down and then it's gone back up. I believe the main increase from '25 to '26 was the allocation of Annapolis United funds to the mayor's office which was more staffing to our outreach team. And as you can see we are also asking for more staffing through the deputy director and the assistant PIO and we are also, mainly asking for more contract services, contract support. So in order for us to get to Annapolis Works, we have to support the staff from a strategic level and help kind of these bigger initiatives like the website upgrade and strategic planning and the resident surveys, we need outside support to effectively execute those things.

So that is why there is an increase in the mayor's budget but you can see that we also decrease supplies and other things. And I just wanted to point out, bring up that we will be putting forth an amendment in the in this current budget to include the community engagement administrative position which is a current position in our team that accidentally was not included in the budget, and I don't know if do you want to explain that a little bit, Capri?

Capri Turner, budget analyst. My assumption, it's not a direct answer, but my assumption is that during the transition from Munis to our new neogov system that we're using for HR now, that it got lost in our reports. So we will be bringing forth an amendment to include it in the budget as it's in a field position.

So this is this is basically an administrative error to represent what's actually already reality.

Right. Peg fund, this goes just goes over, I kind of talked about this briefly earlier but it just goes over, you can see our revenues are decreasing year after year. So we do have, I don't know. Preeti, do you wanna just quickly mention that we do have some reserves in the PEG fund?

Return or budget analyst? I don't know if I have to say that every time.

First time for the day is fine.

Okay. So we do they the PEC fund has, fund balance. What they requested for their expenses for FY '27, We only had to use a little bit of that, to get them what they asked for for expenses for FY '27. The hopes are for FY '28 to possibly use, a little bit of general fund or additional other funds to cover the expenses that they proposed for FY '28. But for FY '27 this meets what they asked for for expenses.

Do you

guys know what the PEG funding is?

Yeah. Yeah. I think we heard it maybe it was right before you came. Yeah, I think Neely covered it. Okay, you got let's say one more minute, wrap it up.

Okay, sure. Absolutely. So this is just I don't need to go over the details but I I've kind of grouped our team into our outreach team and you can see the budget and how they're spending their money within each one of our kind of like sub departments within the mayor's office. To the left is all of, you know, their stats and then I just wrote quickly like why their work matters. So I'm not gonna go through all the details here.

I did the same thing for the Hispanic outreach team, their budget details, and then the comms team. You can see the TV studio, how much we spend on that. And that is primarily staffing for all the broadcast, taking pictures of events, we do video production like the state of the city, and also graphic designs. So that is all fully, staffing money. And then the community engagement, which is our community engagement strategist, this is all of the events that we do for the mayor that we brought on board, all the staff roundtables, strategic stuff, and then also a lot of this person's time is spent on boards and commissions.

We have a lot of reviewing and cleaning up of our boards and commissions and putting in processes and standard operating procedures in order to make them run efficiently. And then constituent services, the ombudsman, which just started in March. So that's it.

You. Audrowoman O'Neill, you want to start us off?

Yes, please. Thank you very much, Chair. I have several questions and I will try to frame them as we go through. So if you could go back to page seven of your presentation. I'm confused about the converting the assistant PIO position from contract to full time, because it lists zero benefits here, but they're listed on our, staffing summary as an n nine. So there are no benefits attached to an n nine. That's my question.

So on her slide, it's showing what current for f y twenty six he currently has, he only receives FICA. I mean, the only benefits that come out is FICA on in the actual budget book. The n nine is the conversion for f y twenty seven.

Okay. So but above that, when we're talking about the deputy chief of staff, we're seeing what the cost is in total. So I don't know why we don't see the cost for the conversion.

Yeah. Because I think it's because he's already receiving benefits as an employee agreement and the deputy chief of staff is a totally new position. Is that correct?

Do you want to know the conversion cost?

Yes, please. Because I'm assuming that the above cost, the $1.95 $6.20 is inclusive of salary plus benefits. But if we're moving, a part time contracted position into an ex full time exempt position, we also need to see that benefit cost because

I that understand. So the full cost total compensation for that position converting is $10,200

So that would be added to the 58.67?

I think that she's showing the full amount of the salary for FY '27. The actual addition to what he's currently being paid is only $10,000 $10,200 Okay.

But of how much of that is benefits?

I can give you the breakdown. I don't I only have the total compensation.

Okay. I

just think it's misleading because it's Yeah. Zero benefits receiving as a contractor. When we're looking at the f y twenty seven budget, it's budgeted apparently. So I'd like to see the breakdown of that. I won't Okay. Belabor that, but I just feel that it's not a fair comparison if it's saying zero benefits but that's not the case.

Yeah and my apologies I think I did not display that the best way. But I will we will share with you what the salary and benefits are and then also what we're currently paying for that position and what the difference is for the cost for fiscal year twenty seven. So we'll follow-up with an email.

Thank you. I appreciate that. Yep. On page nine, when you talk about the non personnel enhancements, I know that our Granicus contract is not in the mayor's office, I believe. Is it in IT or is it in central services? Is that one of the things that was moved to central services?

I think it's in IT. Okay. Yes.

So I'd just be interested to see what we currently pay in GuaraniKIS software usage versus adding another 50,000 in software upgrades, basically, enhancements, I'll call them.

So you wanna know what we currently pay for Granicus as a whole and then compare it to what these upgrades cost?

Yes, please. I believe about three years ago, we talked about the software conversion. I wasn't able to go back to look to see exactly which year, but I'd be interested to see like, we've been a Granite Kiss customer for a long time, and is that additional that's being added on? I think my other question was answered because when I look in the stamping summary, I didn't see our Outreach listed in that. But so there's 23 employees if that's if we're

because I'm sorry. Are you talking for the mayor's office?

Yes.

So in the budget book under fiscal year budget highlights, it talks about eliminating the

bit the So,

a a

the eight council members at the very top.

I want to go to Mitchell real quick, our PIO to answer one of these questions. I think she's got it.

Good morning. Mitchell Stephenson, PIO for the city of Annapolis. I think it's on the next page. Grannicus, the Engage HQ. This solves a tremendous problem that we have across multiple departments.

The city has more than a 100 capital improvement projects that are included in the budget books and we do not meaningfully engage our residents on what these projects are, what they mean for their community, where they originated, how much they cost. There's a lot of information that we could deploy and the County Of Arlington Virginia has a fantastic model. I met the woman at a trade show, tracked her down, found out that this is the model that they use. It's GIS centered so you can go to your own neighborhood and find a project, find out where it came from, how much it costs, when does construction begin, when are there public meetings about it. It is a very comprehensive outbound messaging tool that we'll be able to use to communicate directly with residents about infrastructure projects, capital projects that are happening in the Annapolis community.

So that is the Granicus add on that Alderwoman O'Neil was just referring to. I just wanted to make clear what that was. Thank you.

Thank you.

I'm gonna jump in before we move to you're done on to Roman O'Neill, right? Lisa, was your last question.

That was my last question.

I'm going to jump in just because I have a couple that are related to yours before we go to you, if you don't mind. Let's start with these none of these are in our budget book as best I can tell. Doesn't say it under enhancements, doesn't say it under contract services. So where are these? Are they are they supplies and other? Are they contractual services?

So the enhancement request for the cons contacts like Engage Annapolis and IndiGov are software and all software has been centralized to ITS. So you will see it in ITS.

Okay. That was gonna be my next question is why don't we put this under IT. Great. Okay. Then the other thing I wanted to ask about going back to slide seven is along with auto Roman O'Neil's question about why the benefits are so low for the comms p o PIO. How do we have a 59% benefit costs, fringe cost for the deputy chief of staff. That's higher even than we pay to police.

So the benefits are based off of the salary. It's FICA. It's FICA, it's fully loaded benefits. So this is the fully loaded benefits before they, make their selections. In FY twenty seven you will actually see them go down based off of their selections. We just anticipate that they're going to select everything and it also includes, with a family. So it's not the true cost, it's just the anticipated budget for the benefits.

So for any position that we don't have in place yet, we would expect to see a 59% benefit rate?

It's based off of the salary. So no, it's gonna vary. Because it's FICA, it's Viva, it is pension and health benefits. We budget approximately 27,000 just for benefits, health benefits alone.

Okay. So it's a I get what you're saying. So it's a flat amount that we're budgeting. And so for somebody with a higher salary, You'll it would be a lower

see an increase in benefits for a higher salary for the Viva, for the FICA, and for the pension.

Right. It's a mix. So some things are responsive, some things change with salary, some things do not. But overall what that means is that just taken as a sheer, the whole package as a percentage of salary, the whole thing varies as a percentage of salary because there are some elements that are budgeted as fixed amounts when we've got a vacant position. Right? Like health benefits and some things like that. It's just flat amount.

So if I go and look at like in the fire department where we're adding seven new positions, do they have a comparable benefit percentage, fringe percentage?

You'll see the same thing.

Okay.

We use the same calculation for all new positions.

Okay. Thank you. Sorry to jump in before you. Go ahead.

That's okay. Thank you. Good morning. So the first comment I want to make about the presentation and the budget is I want to applaud the alignment between the budget and what the mayor said as a candidate and what the mayor is saying as the mayor and his commitment to communicate and Annapolis works. So first and foremost, congratulations.

I mean that's a tremendous job. I'd like to first ask a question consistent with what the mayor has said. There's been a significant community outreach effort and I'd like you to evaluate for us the cost of that program? Presumably it wasn't budgeted before and I'm not asking you to comment on the impact, I'll leave that to him, but the cost to date of the mayor's community outreach program.

Yes, so the cost we have our community engagement strategist Laura Richards. She's a one man shop who does all of the events that are listed on the slide, the town halls, the wardwalks, the office hours, staff roundtables, and all the staff meetings. Her time varies. She spends about so this is her salary. I could give you exact numbers if you would like in a follow-up but I do have kind of how her time is allocated.

On the strategy part of it which is like the staff roundtable part, it's about she's about 25% doing that, 25% doing event management, 25% doing boards, and then she also 25% of her time is engaging with nonprofits, organizations, and businesses. So dealing with some of those broader community issues. In the beginning her time, know, when we did the staff roundtables, I have it in my notes, the roundtables were it was like three to four weeks of planning those events and then it's probably about a week for maintenance. So that means following up on all the things we committed to doing, so making sure that you know we have to deal with all the directors and the departments of what we heard from the staff and what we committed to doing in those town halls or in all staff meetings. And then just to give you an idea of the the town hall's capacity, a town hall is about eleven to fourteen hours I'm estimating of manpower.

It's four hours of planning, from the community engagement officer. We have and then staffing it is like another two hours and then it's about five to eight hours of filming from our TV studio. They filmed every single town hall to date and we've had over a thousand views on YouTube of those town hall videos so that that's an average about 220 views per video and the cost of a town hall video is $600 per recording. So that kind of gives you an idea of manpower hours, and I could run the numbers and give you exact numbers per hour if you would like. Our walks that we coordinate are about two to four hours and why it's two to four hours is you know the planning of the walk, you do the actual walk is an hour and then there's all this follow-up afterwards.

So if residents are providing feedback we have to make sure that, okay, if there's a you know a pothole and they need to submit it somewhere that we're actually taking action to follow through with what we heard or handing things over to our constituent service ombudsman. And then we also do the office hours which are about anywhere from three to four hours per office hour. We do them monthly and this is also staffed. You take notes and then we're following up on all all the things that we heard to make sure that there's follow through action to respond to the residents.

Thank you. So this is probably the most important question I'll ask in the in the couple weeks here because the challenge is the better the staff does, the easier it looks. And then it's really easy to be critical about the amount of staff. So I would encourage the staff to continue to communicate the amount of effort that goes into a successful communication effort and I think you just outlined it really, really well. If we could transcribe that or something like that, that would be useful.

Connected to that, the ombudsman. And with the change of administration, new ombudsman, new members of city council, there's a significant level of investment in the ombudsman. One individual working for the strategist. Can you just briefly explain what that investment goes to for the residents? The role of the ombudsman and what is their focus area and why is it worth a significant amount of taxpayer money?

Yeah, so this is a full time position and in a lot of cities they have somebody doing constituent services and somebody serving as the ombudsman. We have one person doing both and I'll kind of clarify the difference between constituent services and ombudsman. Think of constituent services as you are helping the resident get through our system faster, understand how to pay their utility bill, understand how to get a pothole fixed. So trying to get them we have those answers we just have to guide them down the right path. So think of that as constituent services.

A lot of, our executive administrator picking up phone calls is a lot of constituent services response. But the ombudsman think about it as they are serving as like a neutral party between the government staff and the residents and finding where the holes are. So like kind of coming up with these systemic issues like parking, we hear a lot about parking. Making sure that we are coming up with solutions and possibly even legislative changes that can streamline our processes to help the residents. And these are these are these like one off issues, know, you're having trouble with permitting and there's like something you're missing.

So really getting to the bottom of what's causing these bigger systemic issues. So think of it as like more of like a strategy which then helps support the legislation change and also just proposing solutions to the departments like what if we did it this way instead of this way, is that possible? So so that's really the role of the ombudsman and I mean you can see just in one month you know responding to almost 600 emails, you know writing 245 responses and these responses aren't just like here's where you pay your water bill. These are complex things that you have to coordinate within different departments and their staff to get the right answer to the constituent. 120 cases closed in a month and we're building processes and systems that will help feed more information to the residents to hopefully help them respond on their own, know such as the website redo.

That's a big thing. We're already making changes to the website when you go to the ombudsman page to make sure that the tools that we do offer are right front and center so they know exactly like the frequently asked questions. So that's kind of my long winded answer.

Now thank you very much. I think that's useful and another answer we might transcribe. I think my last question is on slide five. And we're on day two of finance committee looking at the budget. And I wanna point out that you're benchmarking, performance metrics.

And this is a tough balance for the city. Some some should have been benchmarked, across the city and art, and some as I think this is an example of this is honest planning where you could make up a number and put it here and it doesn't really mean anything and the answer next year would be well we made up the number. And so I want to applaud this and I want to use this as an example as we go forward where you have committed to stating to creating benchmarks for the future. And and that's actually not really a question as much as it is a statement. And and so Mr.

Chairman, I have do I have another minute? Sure. The page about slide three about broadcast this year. This seems to be a challenge and I'm speaking specifically about broadcast. By my math, there's two thirty seven broadcast events in '26 and by my math, five working days, fifty two weeks, there's two sixty workdays.

So we're talking about one day a month that this team is out. One day, one event a day this team is out there. As you look at modern technology and and residents starting to get used to being able to watch events like this one, online without having to come into city hall, do we have enough investment in our broadcast capability in order to do what we need to do, not what we want to do, but what we need to do, and is this something we should be looking at to invest more in the future?

That's a great question. I mean, I would be happy to I can share with you the calendar also of I mean some days it's two broadcasts a day and it also breaks down the staff that it takes to set up a broadcast. So I think there's a lot more work that goes into the broadcast than people think. You know, it's a half hour to set up one, you know, an hour to four hours depending on the meeting, and then a half hour to tear it down. But we do have, a breakdown of all the people that work, for the TV studio hourly rates so we could you know, you can dig into, how much we're doing.

Another thing that's part of that is we are going through and doing a process evaluation of, the boards and commissions, and just determining maybe some of the we don't need to be recording all of them if we have them in person. And if we have them in person, then that could alleviate some of the broadcasting staff to do other things like the state of the city and, be it events with the mayor to take. So we're still trying to kind of figure that out and I welcome my PIO to come up, to say more about the broadcast and that question because I know she probably has some more to say.

I just want to provide some con Mitchell Stephenson PIO for the city. I just want to provide some context because that those numbers do not include August. We go quiet in August. So we often have multiple broadcasts you know starting from financial advisory or early morning city council broadcasts to you know planning commission which can go till or city council meetings which can go till midnight or later. So it is not just a matter of one a day it is making sure that we have capacity to start a meeting at 07:30 in the morning and go till 01:00 in the morning the next day if we need to.

So yes building capacity for our TV studio is very important. Part of that is that PEG fund where we're talking about making sure that we maintain our capital expenditures within this room but also being able to take that on the road. So those are some of the enhancements that I'm I think are we doing an amendment for that for Peg? Doesn't matter. Don't want to put you on the spot. But yes, so making sure we maintain our capacity there and building it is very important.

Thank you. I do not need the staff analysis. That's you. I guess what I would ask to get back to us on is really a yesno question is do you have the capacity in fiscal year twenty seven to do what you think is going to be required of you in this area that's so important? And if the answer is no, it's a one word answer. If it's yes, what do we need to do on a budget to make sure you're able to continue to inform the residents? Because I do know that people are watching this and and it's a key part of what we're doing.

Yeah and I'll get back to you with an answer to that because I do think there's, you know, there's times where we're like, oh this would be great if we could do a video tutorial on this but we don't have the bandwidth to do it. So my gut is yes, we could probably always use more capacity because you can always do more videos, you can always do more interactive things that would benefit our residents.

And I think I'm out of time so I'm just gonna ask one more question and if you could just get it to us as part of

Can say, why don't we put it in the follow-up document that we have?

Is what is not in this budget in the mayor's office that you all need to get done, that you need to be in a budget that six months from now we're gonna wish was there? And if you could just get that to us and we'll we'll put it in the document that we're putting together.

Okay. You don't want me to answer that now?

I don't. Okay. We'll put the question in the document for follow-up.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay. I want to dig in in a couple places. The big thing the big changes to me here is that we're increasing salaries by about 20%. We're increasing contract services by about 50%, and we're kind of offsetting it with a big cut to salary it's to supplies, which is really in the special projects category. And I'm trying to understand what we're cutting. That was not in the presentation as far as I saw, but that's a a huge chunk out of supplies and other. What is not gonna get done because of that?

Yeah. So one of the things, and Capri feel free to chime in on this, is we had received a lump sum for Annapolis United. And some of that money would go to the police department and some of that money would go to the fire department. We have now in this budget moved that money to those departments so they don't have to come to me to get approved for that money. So that's one thing. And then the other trying to think that was probably the biggest one because that's $40,000.

Historically, the mayor's community initiatives have been $70,000. Some of that has moved split between no harm and the Hispanic outreach. So that has moved to contractual services instead of being in supplies and others. And the only other thing that out to the other department.

So it's listed for us as being special programs goes down and special projects goes down. And those two I'm like I don't know what that means.

Special programs is Annapolis United.

Okay.

So some of the, no harm salary and benefits used to be in contractual services. That has moved up to salary and benefits now.

Well I think it was in special programs, right? Yes. It was in special programs and now it's Yes. In

Got it. Okay. That's helpful. I'm sorry, remind me you just said no harm or NAM?

No harm.

Got it. Thank you. This is really probably more a question for the city manager or maybe it's for you, Kabri. But why are these three both two new and one existing consultant not listed as staff? Why are we not putting them as contract staff?

So generally So the city uses contract staff in a couple of different ways. We use the same word but we mean a couple of different things by it. And in our casual usage we don't make much of a distinction but there is a difference when it comes to the budget. So for a lot of the contract staff that you see listed in the budget where they're included in the column, those folks are city employees. Right?

Like there's an employment relationship that's acknowledged on the part of the city. So that's one kind of contract staff. They have an employment agreement, right? That's typically how we will internally refer to them as an employment agreement. And then you've got true contractors who are going to get like a ten ninety nine and there is not an acknowledged employment relationship between that person and the contractor. So that's part of the distinction you see here is that for some of those folks they are true contractors. They're ten ninety nine contractors.

Got it. I think that answers my question. Kind of transitioning from that, and maybe our PIO wants to come back for this answer, but maybe. But it seems to me so absolutely no doubt we need additional capacity relative to what we've had in the past in the PIO's communications role. My question is why does this arrangement that we're currently being proposed of we've got we've got the main PIO and then we've got an assistant who's relatively low grade and then we also have a sort of presumably if we were to hire them very high grade consultant as opposed to just having the main PIO and then having a second person who is a high grade but not having an additional consultant.

Do you get like those are two options. I'm trying to understand why we went with one rather than the other.

Sure, yeah I'll take that. I think as far as the communications consultant, a lot of the stuff that they're working on is like interim things, know, like the website upgrade. Once we get past the website upgrade, like next year we might not need a communications consultant or maybe we only need half of that. So I think it allows us with a little bit more flexibility when we're really needing to focus on that strategic stuff because we don't have the bandwidth to do it that we have the flexibility of bringing somebody on you know thirty hours, twenty hours, ten hours depending on what's on our plate. And I also I mean what would you have to say?

There's a difference between the day to day operations of the public information office. We are helping all eight departments. We don't do police, fire, and recreation and parks, but everybody else. We are helping with public information just ongoing communications what have what's the fire sprinkler application process with what are inspections what roads are closed social media press releases road closures for boat shows all of those kind of things on the day to day basis. Where I have really struggled with the capacity of the job are these big projects carving out enough time to be strategic and thoughtful about the website redo, making sure we're capturing all of our stakeholders, city doc and I know C and I is not a city initiative or project but I am the communications liaison for that project.

I manage the website, I push out all the press releases, create all the flyers for the community meetings, all of that lands on us whether it's ours or not. When we have those kinds of things I don't have the time to be strategic, plan it out, and and do it well because I'm always in putting out the fires mode. Having a communications person who can come on and help us to strategize and do these things right so that it's not always just putting out fires is critically important to how we communicate to the public and get their buy in on these initiatives. Know part of the part of the challenge we have is we're putting things out. People don't know anything about it.

If we can be thoughtful and pay out the information of why it's important to people we don't have to answer those arguments later and I think having that communication strategy person in there to take on the long term big projects is is really important for us to be able to get it right.

Yep, thank you. Yeah.

I would just add that you know if you're looking at the communications consultant cost versus you know the deputy chief of staff as a question you asked earlier with the benefits, you know what I mean, that saves some money right and it gives us more flexibility. Sure, we'd love to have somebody in another senior person like Mitchell, in the office to support, the PIO because I I think there's plenty of work to be done but there's also a lot of work like all the citations that we do. There's a lot of stuff that gets done that is not at the level of a higher paid or higher grade employee.

And also just for comparison other municipalities near us Laurel, Bowie, College Park none of them have a one or two person shop. You know they're five or six people doing what we're we're pretty tightly run and efficient with what we do. If we could be a little bit more thoughtful, I think we'd we'd crush it.

Yeah. I don't I don't doubt it. Like I said, clearly, there's additional, capacity needed just to lessen the structure. And along those same lines, is there a philosophy about why it does or does not make sense to have PIOs sprinkled in departments versus centralized?

That would be a question for the city manager.

So there actually are a couple of folks that are scattered in other departments. The police obviously has a position and there is someone within the office of emergency management that bears some communication responsibilities there. On a day in and day out basis, police obviously probably has the most volume of public information that gets put out. That person also tends to provide some level of service to the fire department, just kind of public safety in general. Not all the time but sometimes.

Fire has a fire has a a PIO detail so it's not always but if there is a an incident then that battalion commander can call in a fire PIO who will come in and and take on that task.

So retired guy who's a contractor. Right?

So well, no. So Bud Zapata is Bud Zapata. Who's working on the as a fire

Kenny Martin sometimes too.

Yeah. So there is a little bit of capacity in some other places where there's a little bit of heavier load. There's also within Department of Recreation she was here yesterday who works on advertising and stuff like that. Not an official PIO but provides some kind of graphic support. Marketing.

Marketing and stuff like that. So there is a little bit of capacity across the rest of the city. I think that one of the things that having a more centralized office allows and having that extra capacity here does is there's a level of coordination that happens here because Mitchell and the rest of the team see across the city. And I think that coordination and consistency in messaging is important. And so I think focusing here furthers that particular good.

I just want to add, I would welcome you to participate in a demonstration of IndiGov which is going to help us, it's one of the enhancements that we have, one of the software pieces that is going to help us with some of our outbound communication as well as some of the inbound ombudsman communication. But our ability to take things like a sanitary sewer overflow that you know impacts just a neighborhood. We don't have to tell the whole all of Annapolis about that. This will allow us to geolocate exactly the community that we want to speak to and speak directly just to them. So using a little bit more smart government technologies that exist to help us really almost communicate one on one with our residents.

Yeah, I think that's a good goal and I'm going to ask some questions of IT about it. Mr. Chairman?

Yeah. Can I just comment on this because I don't want this conversation to end with it? This is what I did for a lifetime. What we do in Annapolis is best in class. I mean to have the centralized communication reporting to the mayor where she can engage with the department heads and actually get the truth quickly and reduce the number of staff we have to have across departments. I mean I think I'm really impressed at the way we do it in the city of Maryland.

I appreciate that because I sort of have crafted this in my seven years here so it was not this way when I first came but I appreciate that.

I want to make sure we have time for Alderman Alsop Johnson to ask any questions she might have. Okay. I don't think you I didn't see your mic light up, but for the TV studio she said not at this time. Alderman Savage sent in some questions. I've got some fun ones for you guys.

One, just just pulling from these. The philanthropist consultant I'm editorializing and mixing it with his question. I think it's a good idea. I think we will make money off of it. I object a little bit to the characterization that we haven't done it before. I mean, I I think there has been private funding, but that's I I still think it's a good idea. His question was whether this is one time use or something that we anticipate to be recurring. And then a question I'd like to add is what are our performance metrics for that? How how are we evaluating? Did they do their job well or not?

Yeah, mean that would all be set in the scope of work, you know, with the contract. And I think this is something, you know, why you bring in a position like this and as a contractor is we test it out, we set the scope, we pick projects like big, you know, CityDoc or C and I or whatever the project is that we want to bring additional outside funding in, we pick those projects, set targets, you know. We want you to raise $5,000,000 for CityDoc, we want you to raise $10,000,000 for C and I and set timelines and it would all be in the scope of work for the contract and I feel like that's how you measure it and you know along the course of the year of the contract and you know by halfway you should be hitting x numbers to meet your goals.

Great. Okay. Thank you. I'll be interested to see what those end up being. That's all I have and we're just about at time. I'll give time for my colleagues if anybody's got any burning last thing. Automobile O'Neill. Oh, miss Turner?

Answer the other part of that question that it does not use one time fundings for that.

Yes. Thank you. I understand that. My question and thank you for reminding me. I feel like I actually not going to answer to Is the mayor's office anticipating that we would probably have this again next year or you don't know yet?

Yeah, I feel like that's where in an evaluation period, right? You bring the person on for a year and if it's successful then I think we either, you know, decide to bring that position in full time or continue keeping them as a contractor.

Okay. Thank you.

You have a minute, just a statement maybe rather than a question. We've talked a little bit and your brief talks about updating the website. And the person right behind you is going to is the IT brief. So mister chairman, I commend you for putting these two together.

Worked out.

At some point between the two of you, I would love to get a discussion, couple minutes about what the plan is in the next fiscal year to update the website. Ms. Gary I'll leave it to you to say you want do it now or or

We'd be happy to. We have a plan and we have our our comms consultant that's on board right now has a plan and a timeline and is starting to engage with the director. So we'd be happy to schedule a time to sit down with you guys, and share that. We could even do it, I don't know, with the whole council if they're interested.

Okay. Helpful. Alright.

Thank you. Let's see a motion to recess until 09:35. So moved. Second. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. We'll stand in recess for four minutes. Guys, we're gonna start. Meeting called back to order at 09:39 a. M. Again, still on Earth Day. Mister Pacquen, thanks for being with us today. Without further ado, I'll turn it over to you. If you can put fifteen minutes on the clock.

Morning. Brian Packman, Director of Integrated Technology Solutions. And away we go. And I'm gonna say a lot. I'll apologize in advance.

So one thing I wanted to say before we dive into the bullets in this slide is we kind of go through this with finance committee in any public discussion every year whenever I'm up here is that all we're very proud of what is listed in this slide. I think it's important to note that our operations team does a lot of work that we don't particularly discuss in public settings with regards to keeping the city safe, things of that nature. So there's more behind the scenes and I always make the offer to talk offline with anybody that's interested in those sorts of that. That being said, the first one on the list is we've worked very hard in conjunction with the planning and zoning staff to make refinements to our enterprise permitting and licensing software. And I'm sure director Jakubiak will discuss this when it comes time to discuss his accomplishments is that there's been a significant reduction in the average turnaround time of permits as a whole within his department.

And I feel our e p and l analyst on our staff and the amount of work that she's done in refining the product and generating reporting. The director and leadership in that department are now receiving real time statistics as slides on the homepage that they view every morning in that product. As part of so our as you'll see when we get to them, our performance measures were new for this fiscal year, completely revised from previous years. And as part of that we had to implement some new tools specifically for help desk ticketing, trouble ticketing, and uptime monitoring systems for our critical systems. And those were rolled out in Q1 of this year or Q1 of this fiscal year I should say.

And they have led to really good measurements for performance reporting. Our GIS team has worked with we've partnered with a consultant. It's more than a consultant. It's a team that we've migrated our entire GIS environment to a managed cloud based environment. And what that really means is that we're no longer doing our own system upgrades.

We're performing scheduled platform upgrades. We're staying far more current with the versioning of RGIS. It's also hosted in AWS which means there's greater redundancies there. Uptime is very nearly two, three nines on a platform like that. So, yeah, it's it has reduced the lift on the GIS team and the operations team to do routine maintenance.

And, you know, updating the platform as a whole is a very big lift. So offloading all of that and allowing them to be more project oriented has been a great win for us. One of our enhancements for this current fiscal year has been a strategic plan project which is underway. We're kind of wrapping up phase one stakeholder engagement, information gathering, and we're about to enter phase two. We anticipate the entirety of the project to be ready for presentation by the end of the fiscal year June 30. Part of what that's helping us with, we haven't had a strategic plan done in IT since 2010.

It's probably changed a little

bit since

then. Things the the landscape has changed a little bit and and I think it's important to mention really quickly that, you know, that one was kinda like, here's your strategic plan. It was presented and then it's in a binder on a shelf. We plan on continuing the engagement with this vendor. We're very pleased with the work that they're doing so far and the engagement that we've had with them.

We really want it to be more of a living document that evolves over time as we learn budgetary enhancements, constraints, personnel changes, things of that nature. And as you can see in the slide, it's providing some guidance on our mission, vision, staffing definitely, project prioritization. So yeah, we're really excited about that. And then so we're going to in this age of everything become software as a service eventually. We're moving from persistent licenses of our office suites that would be your Microsoft, your Adobe, things of that nature.

And it's a multi year process or multi fiscal year process. But moving that to the software as a service is much like the GIS platform. You're always up to date, you're always on the most recent version. And as an added bonus with our push towards ADA compliance on the website, these tools or the new versions have tools built in for real time compliance checking for ADA which is really was like kind of like the last straw. It was just like okay we got to get away from persistent licensing.

Performance measures. Yeah, a lot of these speak for themselves. We're looking for three nines of uptime percentage which is about eight and a half hours of downtime per year. So far year to date we're right on the number for that and we'd like to continue that into FY twenty seven. The difference between server uptime percentage and software uptime percentage is sometimes that piece of hardware can actually be up but the application that it's running is having issues.

And we've done very very well as you can see with this. Funny thing is I'm putting this slide deck together and putting the finishing touches on it. Yesterday we experienced a roughly three hour outage of our ERP system. So those numbers might dip a little bit in this current quarter. Part of the aforementioned and that's also as we had talked about earlier in some of our accomplishments, that's a brand new tool this fiscal year that we've implemented that tracks those critical pieces of hardware and the software that's running on them.

The other part of that is our help desk ticketing software which integrates directly with our endpoint management system which is a really nice tool to have. We can tie tickets to pieces of hardware and end users that are already in that underlying system. What you'll see here with these numbers, I kind of want to just briefly explain how you have some tickets that are open for multiple days as you're pursuing a solution. You have some tickets that are closed instantaneously, right? So this two and a half hours is an average of some kind of wildly different high and low point numbers.

So I figured that was important to point out. A portion of that ticketing system that we actually only very recently stood up is this feedback system. So when you open a ticket through the software or through the portal as an end user, once you receive confirmation of resolution you have the ability to provide I think it's a five star system on how satisfied you are with the product. And so far we're getting really good feedback on that. One thing I want to point out on the bounce rate, a typo in my original version was discovered.

And so we'll get to that in a sec. Average website session duration, we want to see that either remain stable or increase for obvious reasons for end user engagement. Unique visitors per year, you know, it's not just the residents that visit the site. We have a thriving tourism industry obviously. A lot of people, a lot of events, things of that nature.

So we would really like to see that increase year over year. And I think it's part of the website redesign that was mentioned in the session before me. But we'll see success on that. And the bounce rate, for those that don't know what the website bounce rate is, it's the percentage of visitors that see one and only one page on the site and then they leave. They're not exploring the site. They're not they're getting to the site and they're either finding what they need or they're not happy with what they're seeing and they leave. So currently we're sitting at 48%. And my notes are gone. So I have some notes here. Obviously our webmaster is our subject matter expert on this.

But as far as what's average, 25% to 40% bounce rate is considered exemplary. 50% to 70% is common but not ideal, right? So you'd really want to hedge on the lower end of that. And we're hoping that the site redesign will include well, we know the site redesign is going to include some more engaging content. You know, the thematic choices and things that are made by the leadership on that project will hopefully drive engagement and get that number to go lower.

Brian, I don't want to rush you, but I just want you to know we're about two thirds of the way through time. We got I think you got six minutes.

Okay. Then we won't get into the additional statistics there available for your review and then we'll just go ahead and get into the enhancements if that's okay. The personnel enhancements that were submitted by our department, the challenge, limited staff on our the analysis side of the house. So you've got your analysis team which is GIS, the permitting and licensing suite, and our ERP suite. We run into bandwidth challenges all the time and I'm sure you're gonna hear this from every department.

I already heard it in the presentation before me. Our idea is to have two analysts in each of those disciplines, right? Kind of a lead analyst and a secondary analyst in all three of the disciplines, ERP, EP and L, and GIS. So our request was for two of the more junior level analyst positions. Didn't make it this year. That's okay. The second one is the fire department historically. And as I think all you guys know, I've been here a long time. And the fire department, they're gamers, right? They're gonna do whatever is asked of them.

And a lot of times technology based products are falling to captains, battalion chiefs, things of that nature. These guys are these guys are smart and they're really good, but they're they're firemen by trade. And we were lucky enough to get some consulting money in FY twenty six to bring on an analyst consultant to assist and they have one very large implementation that they're in right now but just to assist them so you're not having firemen basically not doing their job. So this was included in the budget and that is the conversion of that consulting role into an employment agreement position. And we'll be looking to continue that into years into the future.

Mister chairman, can I hang out of that a second? So this this says that the cost is a 133,800 but if you're saying it's a it's a conversion from a consultant to a staff member, if there's not a $133,000 added to the budget?

No sir. That's the enhancement for the consulting position was an even 100 for 26. The conversion takes that with the salary and benefits number that goes along with the employment agreement takes that to 133.8. So that's an important designation. But it

is new money because it was funded out of one time use last year. That's That's why it's new money.

Got it. Okay. I've forgotten that part. My apologies. Thank you. Very, very quickly. So I forget how many years ago it was. I believe it was six or seven years ago. The police union negotiated take home vehicles which involved the rapid acquisition of a bunch of police cars. And part of the budget that went into that was upfitting them.

You know, of course, you got radios, light bars, but part of that is this ruggedized laptop that serves as their mobile data terminal. And the fleet has not aged out the way that was anticipated at the time. So we've got aging rugged laptops in these in these cruisers. So the the proposal initially was $100,000 to replace up to 35 of those laptops. They're significantly more expensive than your average floor issue laptop. We've been informed that to next

see next

this is a terrible terrible word but are planned to be put on the road in FY twenty seven. So we've reduced that to meet the number that we wanted to meet as far as replacements in conjunction with the replacements of the cars. And then finally the chart of accounts and workflows in the ERP in our current ERP software are in rough shape from series of decisions that were made during implementation to usage patterns over the years. And we've identified product that we really think is going to help us identify issues and help us refine workflows, roles, permissions within the system. And that's the line item you see there.

So there's an acquisition cost in there. There is an ongoing cost that is roughly a third of that 18.5 figure. But I actually apologize I don't have that in front of me.

What's ERP?

That is our MUNIS system. That's our resource planning. This is budget, general ledger, those sorts of things.

Stands for enterprise resource planning.

Okay. So this is a I a thing in my notes here of like that might be a little jarring but we can explain. So you'll see that there's this 42% jump. I want to be clear that this is not new money to Mr. Forbes point previously.

This is the reallocating of funds that have historically been dispersed throughout the departments and centralizing them within IT. And if I may skip ahead into the additional information slide, there's a bullet in here that I just want you to see and I'm happy to go back. So the supplies line includes special projects and the special project is included in this is that there is the potential merger and upgrade of computer aided dispatch between Anne Arundel and Annapolis. So there's $343,000 in special projects which is why you're going see a tremendous jump there. In addition to that, contract services includes roughly a half million dollars of all the city cell phone budget being reallocated from the departments into the IT budget.

So that's where you're going to see a very large increase there and I'm going as fast as I can here, I promise. And the capital outlay line includes this massive number of taking all of the software support maintenance and subscription fees out of the departments and under IT. And if we had more time I would tell you about all of the benefits that go along with doing so. But there are numerous and it's really going to improve our posturing and our ability to reduce overhead in the long term. So that kind of thing, that behind the curtain work that I was telling you about on the first slide that we don't necessarily talk about.

Like it's kind of like fight club, you know, first rule you don't talk about it. So there's been plenty of that going on. I'm sure you all seen the discussions from our webmaster regarding ADA compliance. We've selected a vendor for end user training for our content providers and that training is going to be underway shortly. And as the mayor's office staff said in their presentation, the website redesign kickoff is underway.

There's a project plan in place. And Annie is almost ready for prime time. This is a public facing AI concierge. It's very developed completely in house by our webmaster, Eunice Young. It's incredibly impressive and we can't wait to show it to everybody. So we're about probably four to six weeks minimum away from releasing that. But we're very very excited. We're putting it out to the departments for testing now. We just want to make sure it's perfect or as close to perfect as it can be before we put it out.

Great. Thank you very much. Yeah, I've got a bunch of questions, but I'll hold back. I'll go over to O'Neil. Thank you.

I will limit mine to a couple of questions. So thank you for describing the capital outlay, huge increase. I looked at that number and was shocked. So I guess it's a question for our budget analyst. The 2,194,000, I would expect to see at least a large portion of that, 90% of that come off of other budgets, come out of other budgets.

How does that compare? So if I were looking across the boards, in every other department, it should be decreased, the capital outlay, I'm guessing?

Correct.

It's gonna be their capital outlay. Some of them had software within contractual services, so you'll see a decrease there as well. It may not completely tie out though because also any enhancements that were included for software for f y twenty seven, were moved to ITS's budget as well.

Okay. So, from the presentation from the mayor's office, the three software upgrades that they were looking to make would be included in this portion?

Yes, ma'am. Okay.

I'm sorry. It's in capital or it's in contract?

It's in capital outlay.

Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. And I've noticed that we're doing quite a bit of cybersecurity, but we have not filled the cybersecurity specialist position. Is there a reason why that is not filled?

We've changed course on that rather than so I don't want to get too long winded on this. We're going to use an existing class spec. We're really trying to simplify and use as few job class specs as possible. So rather than a standalone position that would have required development for yet another career ladder, yet another job class code, we're using the existing ITS network engineer class code on that. And so that's why you see that where it was approved in '26 unfilled is actually getting filled in '26 or we've changed course in conjunction with some discussions with human resources and the city manager.

We're gonna use an existing class code. So while that position in and of itself is gone, the role exists just with a different class code.

Yeah, think the way that I would phrase that is the intention has not changed but what we've tried to do is to leverage the existing job class structure to provide some additional flexibility and also to sort of speed as Brian said speed that process along a little bit. So by doing that through those discussions that's in the works. So there is every intention to have someone who's really got cyber security as a primary, like that's they're responsible for cyber security in the city. That ends up being a subset of what falls under network engineering writ large. Sort of a technical answer, but every intention to do that, there is absolutely a need for that.

Just to add on to that a little bit, like as we go through the strategic plan and staffing recommendations are given and hopefully it grows over time, We have every intention of following that mantra of keeping the number of job class codes to a minimum for simplicity's sake, for flexibility's sake.

Thank you. That's all the questions I have.

Alderman Thorpe, you're up. Thank you, mister chairman. Thank

you very much. Your performance measures are very impressive. So appreciate the, the work you put into that.

Yes. I concur.

On slide three, and you talked about it briefly in your discussion, but the website bounce rate of less than 60%. And you mentioned typo.

Yeah. So I when when I became aware that that was 60 and not 50, it is it has been changed. I that was not my intent to make it 60%. It was my intent to make it 50. So Oh.

And it says 50 up there?

Yes, sir. Got it.

Thank you very much.

And and it's been revised on the file in the drive.

Okay. Thank you very much. So I wanna follow-up on old woman O'Neil's point about the capital outlay. And and I I would like the finance committee to get a little deeper dive into this because as we work through a budget process, it makes sense don't question what you're doing here at all. But to give us a level of confidence, I think we're talking 2 point something million dollars.

So what I would like to see is a spreadsheet that says 1 point or or $22,300,000 was moved from the departments to IT, taken out of their budgets. 2.1 of that or 2.5 of that was put into IT, and then enhancements over and above that was x number of dollars. Otherwise, we really have no confidence as a finance committee what happened here. And so, could you provide us that kind of detail? Yeah, we

can work together on that and get that to you, absolutely.

Okay. And I would ask you to run that through the city manager as well just to make sure that we're all speaking apples to apples to apples.

Yes sir. And not only that, part of this we actually moved some of our software out of miscellaneous contractual services as well. That we can generate a report. We have an inventory of what was moved in dollar amounts. Oh, I'm sorry. We have an inventory of what was moved in the dollar amounts. So I can work with Capri and we can kind of show you how that shook out.

That'd be great.

Yes, Thank you

very, very much. We can make a nice Sankey diagram out of it. You know where it's flowing?

We talked about website. I just would like to add that to your your due outs as well with you and a mayor's office to provide the city council what the future is of the website. And and I think what what I'm looking for is a high level brief of what the strategy the vision is for the new website and then more specifically, how much you plan to spend on it and who's managing that project? Having managed a couple new websites, four becomes $100 pretty quickly.

Yes sir. So we've been a partner with our website platform vendor for quite some time now. And part of our contract with them actually includes a periodic website redesign at no cost. It's part of our contract. It's supposed to be every four years. That fourth year came up last year. We negotiated with them to put it off for years so that we could have the new we knew we were going to have a new administration one way or the other. So we pushed it back a year. They were kind enough to agree to that. So the baseline number as far as from the hosting company and the assistance that they provide through the web design, there's no cost to that.

And from an ITS perspective, our in house staff namely you know the webmaster is going to be working with office, their consultant that was mentioned earlier. And so really as far as a nuts and bolts perspective, it's included in our support and maintenance costs with the vendor.

So that I think could be great news, it could be bad news, right? Sometimes if it's free, it's worth what you paid for. And I think we have to be open with ourselves. And I don't I don't look back at all. I look forward.

But the website's pretty clunky. And I think those of us now who use it a lot, I can navigate it pretty quickly. But the public who goes on to it to try to find out how to watch the city council meeting, it's just that basic kind of thing much less put in a report and together with your point about Annie and all that. I guess my question would be are you satisfied with this arrangement that we will create a website that you stand proud of as the director of Annapolis IT that is useful for the residents?

Without hesitation, yes sir. I think the partnership between IT and the mayor's office, the message I forget what the title of the consultant that they brought in. But in our monthly directors meeting we recently received a project overview slideshow that we'll provide to you, a project plan. There's going to be a ton of state both internal and external stakeholder engagement that goes along with that. The platform itself supports enough change, you know, the degree of change that I think this administration would like to see.

And speaking to your point, some more engaging content, reduce that bounce rate, you know, get people to stick around and explore a little bit. So my confidence in the platform without hesitation, yes, I believe in that and I believe in the team that we've assembled to guide the redesign forward.

Thank you. And I would ask you and the city manager to if there's any problems or any need for resources or need, this is so important for the for the residents that to let us know.

I agree with that, and I appreciate that. Thank you, sir.

My next question is credit cards, and this kinda goes to your point about consolidating, efforts. Yesterday, we heard from the director of Rex and Parks that she doesn't take credit cards at Pit Moyer. Couple days ago at at, transportation. We don't take credit cards on our buses. It seems to me that to transition to a new technology for any department head on their own is a challenging task for a person who's already busy.

Is this something that you would be interested in taking on in the future? And do you see a way forward? And I'm I'm also might be looking at city manager because I might be adding workload. And is there anything in the budget now from either a staff capacity or financial to move into a more efficient way using technology? And I'm purposely staying away from the word credit card because that's a possible solution to a problem. So I'm talking about the problem to move to technology in our payments across the city.

So I will take a little bit of let's start with rec and parks. I'm gonna take a little bit of ownership of we're behind on something here. I have we have in place a new merchant. We have the machines. We haven't had the time to roll it out for Wreck and Parks.

It's tap to pay. It's an entirely new merchant account. For a number of reasons in which we won't bring up here that we haven't been able to synergize and get it pushed out. But it is absolutely a priority. The rec and parks department both Pitmore and Stanton will get these new the new merchant account and new machines as soon as we're able to from a bandwidth perspective.

To the buses, Marcus and I this is something that comes up to Marcus on a frequent basis. And Marcus and I I'm sorry, Director Moore and I have spoken about this on several occasions. That is an obvious need. There are challenges that go along with that that are unique to transit. But it's in an exploration phase now.

There's vendor engagement happening. The existing fare box vendor has a solution. The merchant account that goes along with it provides a separate set of challenges because this is a series of very small transactions going able sense to we're on the, you know, from citywide that. On how we handle do those fees is is an important part when you're dealing in thousands, tens of thousands of micro transactions. So there's some complexities there.

Marcus and I have discussed them and we're actively seeking a solution to that.

I will add to that that there's a component of all this that also sits in the Department of Finance. The vendor that he was referring to, there are a variety of vendors and depending upon the solution you've chosen they sometimes really only work with one particular vendor And what that means for the city is that we end up having to maintain multiple financial connections than with multiple vendors. And that does get more complicated from a finance perspective to the extent that we can. It's helpful to sort of be on the same platform across these different things, but there are limits to that. But as as this is definitely an area where it's a partnership between the department, who's who's the the using department, they're the ones who are actually interacting with the public, IT, and finance.

And it really does take all three of those working in concert to really make that work well together.

Is it a fair question to ask you to tell me today or to take the question what is the plan what is the date that we plan to have a solution?

I think that's a fair question. I'm not prepared to give you an answer today. I think that I would speak for both of us in that there are a number of those things that we would have much preferred to have gotten to the end of sooner. And so part of our long term challenge is management challenge is taking an honest look at where are we, what are the roadblocks we tend to run into, and how do we start moving those roadblocks out of the way so that we get to those endpoints sooner.

I would ask you if you could get us that and maybe add if there's a road if there are roadblocks that the city council could help you get over and if it's worth it. In other words, you know, about to ask the question of if you had 5% more, what would you do? You had 5% less, what would you give up? Ms. Buckland, I'm not trying to drive this to the top of your priority list if it's not, But I think the residents are looking for this. We need an honest answer to them. Hey, we're looking to do this in 2029 or we're looking to do this in whatever. Okay. How much time do I have? Have a minute.

So let me get right to those questions. If two questions. If if if this finance committee looked at you and said we're gonna give you 5% more on your budget, what would you do with it? What would you where do you what did you give up in this budget as you negotiated your budget that you are worried about or that you think you could do your your job better if we were able to support you with more more funds?

Positions. People. It's There is no other answer. We were just talking about like or the city manager was just speaking of like what are identify roadblocks. And in our department our staffing levels have remained static for a decade.

Long before I was promoted into this position. So it's just blanket terms, it would be staffing. And I don't I wanna be very careful in saying that, right? Like it's I understand the constraints with which the city is operating. But, yeah, if you were gonna just magically summon 5%, that's without hesitation where I would put it.

Seems like you had that slide up about enhancements where there was one you got and one you didn't get and or or the two people you didn't get. But like that seems like a ready made answer too. Yeah. Where if if you had to cut back, you cut back the thing that you've gotten extra on. And if you had more, you'd take the things you wanted but didn't get. Right?

Yeah. I mean, it's not punting. It's honest.

Got it. So, but let me ask that question. So, if you had to get so, first of all, I think I'm inclined to ask the other directors now that you've consolidated it. Would you prefer to put one more person in IT or one more person in your department? Because I think

Please don't do that.

But what you do crosses all the departments.

So I'm And and every department is equally important to the operations of the city. And I I agree. Good answer. I I would humbly request that

you don't put me in that position.

I will humbly

not do it. Thank you.

And then so if if if you had to give up something, what would you give up?

I'm gonna make a joke directed at her. I'd give those cell phones back. No. I that that's that's obviously a far more difficult question. Right? So five percent of of $6,000,000 is $300,000 And unfortunately even though I was forewarned I forgot to come equipped to deal with that question.

Can I answer part of that question Yes for

ma'am? Please So

one of the there are several reasons behind the centralization of software. There's oversight pieces of that, there's cyber security pieces of that, there's synergy pieces of that. And of course the other desire is to make sure that we don't have duplication either. And so I think that part of certainly my hope is that this arrangement will help give us some better insight into streamlining our software footprint overall. And that's not a 5% today reduction, but to me that's an investment in the long term of trying to streamline our software outlay.

Alright. I I wanna thank you because that is something that I really did wanna get to and she summarized it very well. And I think I had mentioned it earlier in the presentation of of some of the the benefits of bringing this under the IT umbrella is we're going to embark on an audit of where are we duplicating, where is there overlap, where we have multiple departments using similar software, where a site license of one software could serve the entirety of the city government and there's inherent cost savings there. And then the other side of it as she mentioned is the cyber security aspect, right? We have a vendor vetting process that we undertake when we onboard new software.

Anything from as minor as a browser plug in to enterprise, the permitting and licensing or what have you. And not only do those vendors have to be vetted from a cyber security and safety aspect, but in this day and age they have to be vetted for ADA compliance for any public facing things of that nature. So, I'm so glad that you brought that up because I really did want to get that in there today. There's a lot of benefits of moving it in house.

I would encourage you to track that as you go forward and next year when we're sitting here point out, mean building on the spreadsheet that you're going to provide us about the costs and going to next year, I think that's a real opportunity for you to provide information about how you're making our organization better. Thank you very much for a Yes, great

and just one more thing about that is the plan is a formalized audit of these subscriptions with tangible outputs as far as changes that are made, cost savings that are associated with that. So yeah, that is absolutely part of the plan. Great. Thank you. Great. Yes, sir.

Thank you. So when we put that money in last year for the fire department IT analyst, my understanding at the time was there was a specific project they needed to get done and we wanted it out of one time money very explicitly. I sat there and made the argument because there was a project that needed to get done. It seems so it it just seems to boggle my mind that we would say instead of having a, IT administrator who's going to work for all the departments, well, we're gonna fund the one that only works for the fire department. So I'm looking at the city manager or somebody from the finance department to or maybe you can ask us, but I'm guessing if you ask for both, the the question is, why the heck would we do somebody who's only going to work for one department instead of somebody who's going work for all departments?

Well, inevitably in a department as small as ours there's overlap everywhere, right? We don't there's no one in ITS. There probably as long as I'm around won't ever be a situation where we find ourselves in where one staff member is siloed and works on specifically one thing, right? So onboarding this position to a full time employment agreement, yes, the primary objective of that role is to continue the furtherance of the ongoing project. Other projects, there are other modules within that one product that we'd like to see and the fire department would like to see implemented.

But day to day, seven hour a day, eighteen twenty hours a year, that's another set of hands in the department that can assist us on any manner of things. And the skill set required for that degree of position is wide ranging. And there's benefit citywide even though the focus, the stated focus and the actual focus of that position would be to continue to support fire from a technological perspective in any of their ventures.

Got anything to add Ms. Buckland?

From my perspective the question of the them being sort of the point person for fire projects does not mean that they are unavailable to anyone else. And I think from my perspective this is why that position belongs in ITS and not in the fire department because Brian should be able to tap that person for other things. Yes, we have an approximate need in fire that's ongoing. That's fine. But that's not exclusive.

Right? He should be able to use that person for a variety of things. The same way that, you know, there's a point person that works with planning and zoning because there's a particular piece of software that planning and zoning is sort of the business owner of. So you know Stephanie Connor it works a lot with that department. That's the primary thing on her plate but she also gets pulled into other things. So it's we're seeing it in the budget because of how it's labeled and we don't specifically call out the other people. But this is why I want it in ITS because it shouldn't be.

I don't doubt that it should be in ITS, but my concern is that if we fund it if we fund this as is, then we're gonna have somebody spending all their time working on fire when we've got IT needs all over the place and the need with for IT within fire was supposed to be distinct. It was supposed to have an end. And my worry is that it is not appearing to have an end. And I think think when we funded that, there was a discrete project that was like, okay. Let's get us over this hump.

But there's any number of other use. I mean, we just heard all sorts of them about how we could be better utilizing our IT capacity outside of the fire department. And I'm loath to fund this right now because it seems like the status quo is they're just gonna go work for the fire department. So that's it's not a question. That's a statement. Can we go back to the slide about the personnel enhancements? I just wanna see those numbers again. I guess I could pull it up on my computer. Thank you. Okay. So the difference in price is about $33,000. 32,000. 33. Okay. Thank you.

On a position by position.

Right. Okay. Moving on. Can we talk some more about the aided dispatch and why that is needed, what the benefit is of that, the the San Arundel County Police aided dispatch? What's the deal with that? What is it?

I will it for the minute details, I would, defer to, the police

That's fine. I can

understand that. I'm I'm not trying to pass the buck here. No. That's fine. I will I will share with you a high level of so Anne Arundel County is unifying their police and fire dispatch. So, when you call 911 and you're within Anne Arundel County right now phone isn't a dispatcher. The first thing they ask you is police, fire, you know, what's your emergency? Right? And they route you. So the county stated goal with this project is the dispatch is unified. You're skipping that step. You're saving time response time. Our fire department is dispatched by Anne Arundel County. It has been Yep. The world was young.

And the idea here in the intrigue for the police department is again if this is the if we have been invited to participate and this is the rate we are going and the service that we provide our constituents is improved, then this needs to at least be considered. There are some monetary discussions that are going on that I'm not well versed in.

Yeah. I think I get what you're getting at. I think you've answered my question. Okay.

Yeah. This is the this is would be should we participate our upfront capital investment in the implementation of the system.

Got it. Thank you. The software analyst consultant is something that you guys have $200,000 for. Can you explain to me what that does, why it's better to have it as a consultant than a staff member?

This is, again, small department, small staff specific needs during implementations, report building, data gathering. And that's available to all three disciplines within our analyst group, right? GIS, permitting and licensing, and ERP. We have a wonderful partnership with a consultant that works very closely with Stephanie Connor on the permitting and licensing project. I mean to the point where these are regularly scheduled.

Sometimes we need we don't have a need on staff day to day for a database administrator, somebody that's gonna sit at their desk all day long and run SQL queries. But when I need it or we need it, we need it.

Okay. So let me just put a fine point on that question. It is not $200,000 going to one person.

Oh, absolutely not. No,

sir. It's spread makes for numerous vendors.

Yes, sir.

Got it. Thank you. Maybe we can update that in the budget book to have an S on the end. But Alright. Let's see what else did I have here. Oh, so last year we funded a strategic plan consultant and you talked a little bit about updating that strategic plan. I don't see money in this budget for strategic plan. Are you comfortable with that? Is that we've given you the money last year, you're good, now it's all in house? How does that relate strategic planning relate to the budget at this point?

So the 75,000 again I'm not sure if it was sourced in one time or not for the strategic plan. But I think it was, yeah I think it was too. I just didn't want to say something that I wasn't certain was true. This is for the entirety of the initial build. And I spoke very a little bit about our desire for this to be an ongoing engagement for it to be a living document.

And things like that are exactly why that pot of money we were just discussing exists. Where if I need several hours of reengagement because of changing circumstances or our desires or administration's desires. I know that they're gonna be embarking on their own kind of city strategic plan at some point. If we need to change course or tack to vibe with the outcome of that's exactly why we've got that pot of money for consulting services that's available across the disciplines.

Gotcha. Thank you. My last question for you I think is just what's IT well, maybe I'm going to make this into two questions. I'll start with what is IT doing to encourage the use of these new AI tools across city staff? We heard about Annie external facing, internal facing. What is IT doing to encourage that? And we talked a little bit last summer about the project, but can you provide us an update? And frankly, do you need any money to do it? Because it seems to me like a place we could really improve efficiency and save money.

And able business. For which we already have developed kind of a wireframe but I want some more they they had the the vendor that we're using for the strategic plan has an extensive AI background. So they're gonna be a great resource in helping us flush that out. But it's going to be a big area of focus and when we present the outcome of the strategic plan you'll see that that's really helping us drive. So A and E is obviously kind of like your public facing portion of that.

The other part of that is I just got back from a conference from one of our main vendors. They're the provider of our ERP product, our EP and L product. They also provide several other services for us in the city. And most of the sessions that I participated in is or not most but a large chunk of the sessions that I participated in is where are they going with AI, right? How are we going to combat silos?

How are we going to allow staff to leverage AI to peer into our own data and easily generate meaningful reports when that's not something that's easy to do now. And I was very happy to see what's in development. There's a few things that are actually available now that I'm working with our rep to see what the lift is as far as a good example of that is AI powered accounts payable. And that's something that's actually available on our current version on prem. No pressure to go software as a service which is an entirely different discussion for a later day as far as these services go.

But so the engagement with the vendors as far as where they going with their own product and their AI development is a big part of where we want to be.

Great. Could you come back to us with what it would cost to have right now, we have access to I think of their sort of three big players here. Right now, we all have access to Gemini on our Citi once. You know, I had to ask you to get that activated for us. Yeah.

But could what I'm asking is if people within city government wanted to use enterprise versions of OpenAI software or Anthropic software, I'd like for that to be an option. Unless you have some strategic disagreement, which you can I'd be happy to hear about. But what I'm looking for is a cost estimate for to have, let's say, 10 enterprise seats of each one of those so that if folks want to try them out and encourage that experimentation that I'd love to know how much that would cost.

Absolutely we can get the costing on that. What I really want to see before like I'll get you know we can get you cost information. But a big part of that where we I think as an organization want to be first is have that usage policy. How are we safeguarding PII and those sorts of things? We want to make sure that our end users are bound by a set of rules that prevents the sorts of nightmare scenario things that we've all read about with protected information being fed into a large language model.

So absolutely I can have costing information in hand and provided to you, but we really want to take this in a stepwise manner, develop the usage policy, explore options, and then it's if cool if we already know what it's gonna cost and we can come back to you guys.

Yeah. Part of why I want to potentially allocate money towards this is because of that PII issue and making sure that right now we have enterprise Gemini. We can go ahead and put information into it, and it's not going to go outside. And so I know there are plenty of city staff who are using these other tools, but they can't do anything in regards to to PII with those beca and and should

At least shouldn't be.

Yeah. They shouldn't be. And so getting those enterprise versions, if people want them, seems like a good opportunity. And then, you know, if we come back next year and we've allocated $5,000 to this and none of it's spent, no harm, no foul, but I wanna make sure we have that pot of money. I'm looking to. I'm not a 100%, but I wanna

sounds to

me like you and I wanna be in the same place. I just wanna make sure that we're not operating only on my limited knowledge of the topic that we're engaging experts and they're guiding us towards a safe usage policy.

Sure. Thank you. We're just about out time. Alderman Olsson, you got any questions you wanna ask? No. Okay. You got it. I think I tried to already hit a bunch of Alderman Savage's questions. Anything last from Alderman O'Neill, Alderman Thorpe?

One question. You can take this and write it down and maybe it's for the city manager too. Listening to your brief, first of all, it's a fantastic brief. You did the brief, the presentation, you're tremendous. If we were to not fund that second IT specialist, I would like to know what would not happen that you are looking to happen.

We're speaking of the one that Alderman Huntley was discussing.

Drilled down into, exactly. So you don't have to answer it now. I'd actually ask you to put some thought into that and let us know what it would cost. Don't read anything into it other than yes, maybe there's a possibility to cut it. We would like to know what impact that would have and if you could put some thought into that and let us know that would be great.

The three of you?

She's collecting Kayla's collecting all the due outs. We're doing this with every department head.

Yeah, I think she's put together a spreadsheet so there will be some written

Yeah, I saw the link. Okay. Stick it in there. Thank you. Yes, sir.

Beautiful. Not only a great presentation, but we ended right on time. All right. With that, I think, Mr. Backwood, I think we're good. Appreciate you being here. We've got some Thank very more much. Thank you. All right. I should pull up our finance committee agenda.

All right. We do have a couple supplemental appropriations and fund transfers to consider. The first is a $3,000 grant to recreation and parks. I think initially we were planning on doing this yesterday so rec and parks would be here, but it's also not a lot of money and it's just us accepting money, which I always like to say is my favorite kind of supplemental appropriation. So perhaps Ms. Buckland can speak to this so we can vote on it.

Sorry. I will need to pull that up.

It's a $3,000 grant that they're accepting to do adaptive tennis. Seems like sunshine and rainbows and apple pie. I guess if I can ask my colleagues, does anybody have any questions about the supplemental appropriation? Anything you want to know? Karma said no. Is there a motion to provide a favorable recommendation to SA twenty twenty six?

So moved.

Second.

All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Beautiful. All right. Next up is our fund transfer, which is a little bit bigger.

And this, I'm guessing, maybe miss Buckland, you can speak to because this is about our fleet operations, I know has been an important topic. So what we're looking at here is basically transferring some money from our non allocated debt service to our fleet operations. So if you want to maybe just give us a bit of an overview, but really my main question is going to be how do we under count our debt service? Because this is now the second fund transfer that we're taking from that unallocated or from that essentially unspent debt service.

It's the other way, not under counting it. Part of what happened this year was that we did not go to market as many bonds as was authorized in the budget. So part of our task and part of the discipline that the budget team provides and finance provides is trying to not let excess bonds because then you have a specific timeline to use them and you start paying debt service on them. So part of this is the result of that discipline. So because we didn't let the full value of the bonds, we therefore don't have the full value of the debt service on them and therefore then these funds can be used to fill in other gaps such as this one.

Capri if you have anything you want to add.

As far as the transfer to fleet, it was a budget deficiency error that we didn't fund we allocate the expenses for, vehicle repair and maintenance, to each department. Enough was not funded to planning and zoning for the transfer. So this, corrects that.

I'm sorry. Where did planning and zoning come in?

Planning is that's what the allocation is for. So it's going directly to fleet. So in the budget, it would have been allocated to planning and zoning repair and maintenance vehicles. But because we under budgeted it, this is gonna put the funding directly to fleet as it would with that transfer.

Okay. I'm not a 100% sure I understand but I don't think it's I don't think there's a problem. You want to go ahead?

Yeah. Does planning and zoning have their own vehicles that is not in central services?

Yes. So for FY twenty six

So the vehicles that the city has, there are a few pool vehicles but most of them are specifically assigned either to specific people or to specific departments. So the inspectors for example in planning and zoning have vehicles that help take them from from place to place as they're going around the city doing their job. Traditionally the cost of repair and maintenance for vehicles has been allocated out to the different departments that have vehicles and one of the things that happens right away as the year starts is that that money then gets sort of charged against and pulled into just the overall fleet, fleet maintenance bucket that then fleet actually draws from day in and day out rather than this bill goes to this one and this bill goes to this one, right? In this particular case that pre allocation to planning and zoning was underdone. But because of where we are in the year, we're not gonna we're not gonna sort of do that dance of allocate it to planning and zoning and immediately transfer it to fleet.

We're just gonna stick it in fleet and be done with it.

All right. Thank you.

Makes sense. Any additional questions about FT926? No? Seeing none, is there a motion to make a favorable recommendation? I that's wanted to have a bit of a discussion with the committee.

To me, it makes sense to consider this at the same time as our fee schedule. Alderman Thorpe, I know you had an amendment. I'm happy to talk about that. I don't think any of this, no, I'm confident, none of this is time sensitive. It can go at the same time as our it starts in in July, same time as FY '27. So it seems to me that we should put a pin in this and consider it the same day that we consider the fees. Does anybody have an objection to that? Any discussion on that? I

just don't understand why we just don't get

Why we don't get it done.

Just get

it I mean, that's kind of fair too.

I mean, only because we're either gonna do it or not. Yeah. And while there may be a discussion about the future of this, think for fiscal year '27, the the there's no question about a change in policy.

Yeah. The die is cast as it were. Yeah. I mean, hard to argue against let's just get it done. You know, that's what I always say.

So And I think the organizations are are in their planning phase as we speak.

So Alright. Well, yeah. I'm fine with that. You had an amendment. Do you wanna describe it?

Yeah. I would I would like to, to amend the list to add East Port of Rockin, an event that's been going on for many years, brings 40 local bands to to an event that's exceptionally widely attended, and they've they've put 1 $500,000 into charities over the over the years they've been doing it. And I would add proposed amendment to add East Port Of Rock and the fees waived would be approximately $7,000 based on the cost last year of $6,700

So I'm gonna count that as a motion. Is there a second?

Second.

All right. Anybody want to discuss Alderman Thorpe's amendment one?

Have a question. Well, support that. That's an organization that myself and my family has been involved with for many, many years. And, in particular, my spouse has done, hundreds of hours of work for them, over the years. And so I understand that completely. As far as the waiving of fees of 7,000, Is it just because that would be their total fees?

Specifically, it would waive the fees for police and fire. And the cost of that, I said last year, really this year, twenty twenty five, six because our fiscal year. It was $6,700. So it's so I think the specific answer to your question is we're waiving the fees for police and fire, and the number for planning purposes for the finance department that was $6,700.

Okay. I think that it also talks about a a larger discussion or a longer discussion. And we're waiving fees for some events and how that is affecting specific departments, specifically police and fire, when they are sending employees to these events, to work these events, it is most often overtime. And as we see our overtime numbers increase over the years, buyer has almost $2,000,000 in overtime, I think for FY 2026, fairly close, give or take, a couple 100,000. If we continue to add events where we're waiving fees, that's just more I don't wanna use the word taxing, but it's more burden on our budget.

So I think it's a longer discussion. Like I said, I support adding it this year, but I think it's a it's a bigger discussion to have on all of the events that we're waiving fees for.

Go ahead. Alderman O'Neill and and mister chairman, I I absolutely agree with that. I think a review I'm gonna say exactly what you said slightly in different words, but 100% agreement. I think I think the city council and I think the the city staff should take a look at this policy as to what we waive, what we don't, who's asking for it, who's not, what's the criteria, and to your point the financial impact especially since on the overtime thing I plan to ask all the people who do overtime as I did yesterday with Rex and Parks or the Harbor Master, how do we hold how do we set a goal and objective for overtime because I think that's a metric they should use. So I would totally agree with you that we should look at this policy and what is the city taxpayer getting out of this policy and is it the right use of money realizing we're giving up in revenue.

Yeah.

I I think this is a good discussion to have. Maybe we should put it on our agenda for things to talk about after the budget season. I would just put it more on the flip side, which is do we need to be expending as much money on these as we are? It's less a I'm generally supportive of the idea that we should be waiving the fees, but, why are we having such insanely high costs on some of these? And my understanding, yeah, there's police.

There's also increasingly we're asking public works to put up, you know, these barricades or trash trucks or whatever it is for, some of these events. And I think making sure that we keep those costs in check, that would be my priority for it. You looked like maybe you had something to say. No? Okay. Any more discussion on this? Seeing none, I'll call for a vote on amendment one to R826. All those in favor say aye. Motion carries for the amendment. Is there a favorable recommendation for the legislation as amended?

Second. All All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Beautiful. Motion carries. R826 has received a favorable recommendation from the finance committee as amended. With that, we're ready for adjournment. Anybody got anything last things we need to go over today? Nope? Seeing none? All right. Move to adjourn. Second? All those in favor, please say Aye.

Aye.

And we're out.

For some

reason, I always get tripped up

on the

motion with Jeremy Mills. It's like I'm ready to go.