Finance Committee - Regular Meeting

Thirty four AM on 05/04/2026. Good morning, everybody. At this time, I'll take a roll call. Alderman Thorpe, you here? Present. Switching it up today. Put you first. Alderman O'Neill, you here? Okay. I'm present also. Is there a motion to approve the agenda as written?

So moved. Second.

All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Is there a motion to approve the minutes as they from the last meeting as presented? So moved. Second. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Alright. Thanks so much for bearing with us as we got started with things. Folks, the floor is yours.

Thank you. Ayesha Young, Director, Office of Community Services.

Hi, good morning everyone. I'm Erin Lee, Social Work Care Coordinator with the Office of Community Services.

We'll go through our budget presentation. This year is a little over than three but I feel like we accomplished so much. And just to give a little background, I've been here for two years so I feel like I'm just still learning a little bit, but excited about all the things that we've done so far. So we focused a lot on rebranding because when I first started when I got here, we didn't have a distinguished identity, I should say. A lot of people confused us with community action agency or they didn't know exactly who we were or what our work entailed.

So I focused on or I feel like we should have focused on the rebranding and that's something that we did. We did a lot of new materials working with Mitchell helping us come up with new logos and icons and just having a uniform branding. I don't know if you all seen the wellness man before, but the rapping on the wellness man just trying to I don't wanna say that the artwork wasn't great, but a lot of people thought it was like daycare even though the pictures on there were adults, but it still kinda looks like daycare. So just focusing on moving away from that so that we could really establish the Office of Community Services. And as you all know, we house the grants or manage the grants.

One thing that we didn't do were like site visits, some grant trainings, quarterly progress sessions. So we focused on some of that, hosting trainings around grant writing, sustainability, fundraising, AI training, those were received very well. Site visits, visiting each, grantee or whomever signs up. It wasn't mandatory, but we, asked everyone if they were interested for us to come to just sign up and we come out just to observe their work, see how we could better support them, and also put faces to names because I haven't seen a lot of people in person just talk to them through email. And then the quarterly progress sessions was something that I came up with, I'm kinda calling it a progress party to just celebrate the work that the organizations are doing.

Also the success within the quarters, specifically first quarter and then fourth quarter, and then also engaging them in a way to submit their reports. It's like you can only kind of be celebrated for your success and what the organization is doing if you submit your reports and we can actually read to see, you know, your progress and then we gave out some awards for that and just celebrated their success. The health literacy and enrollment in medical building, this is something new. Our enrollment assistant Evie Hernandez, she became a certified navigator through Maryland Health Connection. We also became a they call it something different, but an organization that can certify people to become certified navigators.

In this way they can help people sign up for healthcare through healthcare.gov. So she can walk them through the whole process of how to sign up for care, understanding health insurance, you know, what a deductible is, how to pick the best plan. She's been working on that as well. So that's fairly new. She started last open enrollment which was November 1. Rental assistant changes. We've been working on the longevity of rental funds. When I began, I feel like it stayed open for what? Only like three months? Yeah.

So trying to keep the rental program open longer and some of those changes included asking clients if depending on what their balance was to seek additional support from other organizations, provide us with maybe like a promissory note saying that they will get that support and then also helping them after that. And then we also came up with a few changes that I feel like just really helped just keep the longevity of the funds. I think that's pretty much it. Is there anything else I missed for that? Okay.

Alright, thank you for that. Next slide. So some of the performance measures I'll go through. So the site visits, the benchmark for that is pretty much how many grantees we have and so fiscal year twenty five, actually fiscal year twenty six included community grants, adopted community grants, and, child and family success grants. So that's about 69 grantees that we have.

So again, like I said, the site visits aren't mandatory. However, we would love for all of them to sign up for a site visit, but so far we've only had 19 site visits in fiscal year twenty six. I'm hoping that in fiscal year twenty seven we get all 35, but that is also based on your all's approval for the community grants of year. So that's the 35 number. For quarterly reports, of course, we want all grantees to submit their reports.

So again, 69 grantees for fiscal year twenty five. We actually had 67 this year. The end of year isn't over, but we have 47 grantees who submitted their reports. Then of course, again, for fiscal year twenty five, we will want all grantees to submit their application I mean their reports. For enrollment assistance, since we just began and enrollment is not a yearly thing, so like I said, open enrollment is November 1 through January 15.

It's kind of hard to get those benchmarks, but this is something EBC and I are talking about. I am hoping that maybe like during open enrollment she can get maybe about 18 to 20 clients because that's what she got this year as far as assisting and enrolling them, and then maybe we can create some monthly goals around health literacy trainings to where she actually goes out and speak to individuals about health insurance literacy, you know, how to sign up for a plan, again the deductible, how to navigate the whole health insurance marketplace. Next program, the rental assistance program, open. So my benchmark I used was for this year. Keeping it open at least eight months I feel like is a good goal.

Again, for fiscal year twenty five it was only open four months, for this year it was only open seven months, and then next year for fiscal year twenty seven, I'm hoping we can keep it open nine months. And this is just the average I base that number on. So rental applications received, we technically really don't have a benchmark for that or, you know how we decide who's going to apply, but fiscal year twenty five with two zero nine applications. Fiscal year twenty six, once it closed we had 161 applications and that's why you see TBD for fiscal year twenty seven. And again, applications approved.

Of that two zero nine, we approve 120 in fiscal year twenty five. Of the 161, we approve 92. And again, performance measures will be discussed in figuring out how to measure that success in fiscal year twenty seven. And again new rental applications. So looking over the past years, we had a lot of repeat clients that would apply every year, so new rental applications is something that I feel like we should keep track of and it's something that I have been keeping track of.

So out of the applications that we received for fiscal year twenty five, we had about 50 new applicants and then for fiscal year twenty six as you can see, we had 96 new applicants. So again, performance measures will be discussed on like numbers or new rental application numbers that we would like to see. And then of course we have care coordination and social work, Erin Lee right here, for cases closed. The goal is about maybe 10 a month looking over, you know, all the cases that they have throughout the year. They help about an average of 10 a month, so I thought that was we can continue with that goal and measuring that success for me is closing those cases, making sure that those, residents get the assistance that they need, whether it's us providing the service or Erin and Shania referring them to outside resources.

So for fiscal year twenty five, they closed about thirty three cases. For fiscal year twenty six, sixty five, but the end of year isn't over. And then I'm hoping that fiscal year twenty seven, they closed at least 85 of those applications. Okay. Moving on.

So some other statistics based on our body of work. So the sustainability trainings for the grants, I would love to keep that going, at least having three a year. So fiscal year twenty five we did two, again this year we did three, and I'm proposing to continue with three moving forward. We got a lot of great feedback on the trainings that we provided. They feel like it really helps them, and I also want to continue to support our grantees with figuring out creative ways on how to get additional funding outside of grant mean, yeah, outside of grants because we know with the new climate, political climate and everything, sometimes that's not always sustainable.

So I just wanna continue to make sure that grantees feel supported in sustainability. The quarterly meetings, I would love for us to continue that, especially since they have to submit quarterly reports. It doesn't necessarily have to be all four quarters, but I would love for it to be all four. So as you see our goals for fiscal year twenty five, we actually didn't do any meetings this year, we did two. So again I'm proposing that we at least do four and have at least all grantees attend.

And then the progress sessions, again focusing on quarter one and quarter four, so that'll be two sessions a year. So fiscal year twenty five we have one. This year we have one so far but we're planning our second one for next month. And then again fiscal year twenty seven, just hoping that we can get two in there. And then our community outreach and events, our goal is about 40 because our average is around 41 events in the fiscal year, so I'm going to continue that goal.

So fiscal year twenty five, we had about 41 events. We're not finished. We have some events scheduled for fiscal year twenty six, but we only been to 27 so far. So I'm proposing that we attend 40 events to continue our outreach and engagement. Again, like I mentioned, the health literacy training, so outside of open enrollment to allow EVs to actually go out there and assist individuals with understanding healthcare and also potentially maybe enrolling them if they do have a special enrollment period.

So someone who loses their job, know, who gets married or whatever, qualify to be enrolled in a health plan outside of the marketplace enrollment date. So I'm hoping that we can focus on at least one training a month with some of our grantees. As you can see, we've only done zero for fiscal year twenty five and then one for fiscal year twenty six. So again, hoping that we can do at least one each month for the fiscal year twenty seven. And then tenant legal rights events.

So once the rental assistance program closes, we're just looking for opportunities to just continue to reach people and to provide them with some education. So we hosted only one so far. Yeah. Only one, tenant legal rights events. We've tried to do it in the past fiscal year twenty five.

We was unsuccessful, but this year we were successful with hosting that one and I'm hoping that we can at least have four events for fiscal year twenty seven. Budget enhancements. So one personnel enhancement that we are asking for this year is a case management software called Capstone. This will be for Aaron and Shania, our two social workers care coordinators, just to better streamline our cases and assist with, you know, data tracking and demographics and measuring any outcomes. I think this will be a great addition to the office so that Aaron and Shania can work out of the same system and just their work just be better streamlined.

I don't know if you want to talk a little more about like how it can help but

Sure, so I just wanted to talk a little bit more about Capstone because in addition to just with any social services agency they typically will have a uniform data entry, note tracking, case tracking

and it

also helps for outcomes because we can definitely give I would say more accurate numbers as to how we're helping the community, who we're assisting, their demographics, and that would definitely help with that. And also in addition with the software it can also be used for say other departments that utilize social services in order to track their clients such as no harm. They can track their clients information, look at their clients, see what might be helping, what's not, and that's a big part of what we would love to use the case manager software for as well as just to see what's working, what's not, what could be better streamlined for Annapolis residents.

Thank you. So operating budget, should I read this line by line or are we just right. Okay. Just one thing to highlight, are the supplies and other, you know, the change from fiscal year twenty six projected I mean, year '25 and fiscal year twenty six, we no longer house the adopted community in the child and family success grant. So you see that number has decreased.

Then of course, we house the community grants and rental assistance, which we will still house. Rental assistance has went down a bit. I'm hoping we could get that up a little bit more but it has decreased but I feel like that's our only program and I would love for it to be a little enhanced, but that's just my dream moving forward. So additional information I just threw in our collaboration with County Partners Homelessness Prevention such as ACDS and Anne Arundel County homeless prevention and the coalition, yes, homeless coalition, and how we coordinate with property managers and other organizations, you know, that continue to support our rental assistance program. Aaron and Shania, they connect with Hope for All.

They, you know, connect families with furniture and essential household items. Charting Careers is another great organization that we, connect with. They're always welcome and happy to connect with us to provide programming and support in other areas or I should say neighborhoods and other organizations. And then maintaining that ongoing coordination, you know, with city funded grantees just to continue to strengthen our service and referrals and across program collaboration. And I'm ready for questions.

That's some pretty good timing. Nice. Alder Roman O'Neill, want to start us off?

Sure. Thank you very much,

Mr. Chair.

I have a few questions. You kind of touched on it when we were talking about I believe the rental assistance to repeat clients. Yes. And you're starting to track that or you haven't for this past fiscal year?

So we started to track it a little bit in fiscal year twenty five and '26. So if I can just go back really quickly. So even though we had less applications this year, we had more new rental applicants and I think that's because of the increased visibility that we've been working on. So I want to continue to track that. But also do it in a way to where we're not helping someone, you know.

It's like if someone really does need the help and they have because we have one client, I know he will never really meet the threshold for his rent based on like how much he gets for social security, how much he's being charged for rent, and then you know you have groceries and other bills. It's like trying to track the new applicants but also in a way that we continue to help those that really need it. I

have a little bit of concern about I just wanted to jump in there. The OCS keeps track by name, they keep spreadsheets of everyone who's gotten assistance, how much they've applied for, how much they actually got, who got paid, all the rest of that. The question of sort of in the it's it's it is just a spreadsheet, it's not a database. In some ways that's part of why the discussion about more of a client based system rather than a spreadsheet. So connecting, okay it's this same person and we use the same name across the years, that's the They actually have the underlying data.

It's the connecting across the years that she's really talking about.

Yeah, so just going back in the spreadsheets, entering the names and seeing if they pop up within fiscal year twenty three, twenty four, twenty five and that's how we know if they have been a repeat client.

And I understand that everybody has their own situation. It concerns me that we have repeat clients and that we don't have a process for which to get them to not be repeat clients. I would love to see that happen. Whether it's through partnering or through education or I mean you just said you have a client that will never meet his or her threshold, that's concerning because that means that year over year they're coming back for assistance. So I don't know where I'm going with that question but I think that we need to address that.

Yes. And just as we started to address that in grants, sort of grants should be a way for a community organization, a nonprofit organization to get a start and then build on themselves and that shouldn't be a salary from the city Well so to

I will say I've asked Jada because I'm you know still continue to think about how to measure the success of the rental program and if it's actually you know working. If we're seeing repeat clients, to me, it feels like it's not working because, like you said, it's almost like a salary. I've asked her to reach out to each, property that we assist to ask about delinquency rates. So I'm wondering if maybe I was thinking like if we get the delinquency rates once the rental program opens to then track if it helps decrease their delinquency rates significantly. Because then if it doesn't, then, you know, to your point, it's just figuring out how do we continue to, you know, make this program successful and decrease the repeat clients.

So we are trying to figure out, you know, how to lessen that burden. And we've talked with Isaac Vineyard over at Cove Haven about his financial literacy program saying, you know, if if you've applied and you need to apply again, unfortunately, you won't be able to apply again until the next fiscal year after you take his financial literacy course, you know, and then have some sort of certificate, and then, you know, we see that you've taken it, and then we'll let you apply again. And I also should have mentioned we put in some rules that suggest that if we assist you, it needs to bring your balance either to 500 or less because us assisting you under the rental program should put you a month ahead, you know, as you mentioned. So if you are a month ahead, meaning that we paid, you know, your your rent last month, that means that you should technically be a month ahead and that you should be back on your feet. So we're trying to assist, you know, residents in making sure that their balance gets down to at least 500 or 0 to help them kinda get ahead.

So again, we're we're trying to figure out what makes sense as far as performance measures and lessing the repeat clients.

And you believe the Capstone software will assist in that endeavor?

I think it will assist as far as tracking the data and really highlighting what we probably are missing maybe. So I'm hoping that that program will help us with that.

And there's at least one other program that's operating in the city because I went to their awards a couple of weeks ago that Tony Pratt is running that is a financial literacy

Can you speak into the mic?

The behavior modification program. So basically they have them doing an eight week program and it's week by week and they get different skills for like housekeeping, financial literacy, just, like, a whole bunch of, like, life skills. And then at the end, they have a graduation. They get certificates and stuff. But it's their partnership with HACA. So that is one of their ways to try to prevent a lot of the residents from HACA from being evicted by going through this program and successfully completing it.

Right. So perhaps we should get those two partners in the room because community grants, that's their purpose is helping the city do things that we don't have the manpower for. So perhaps a partnership with, you know, those three and I believe that there's OIC does some work too with financial literacy so that's three partners that we can partner with. Thank you. In your list of recommendations for grantees are there any grantees that have a recommended amount that did not submit reports?

No. Everyone submitted reports, however so sometimes it gets tricky because they can use the funding before I mean, yeah, before like a new quarter report has to be submitted, so we don't technically force them to have to, you know, continue to submit reports. Because if the pro if they already used the funding and the program is done, then we don't really require for them to continue to submit reports. So if you all go in, I'll share with you. If you all go in and see that they only maybe submitted, you know, quarter one report but no other reports or maybe they submitted quarter three reports but nothing none of that I mean, no additional reports, then that is the reason why. Okay. Thank you.

And the outreach events that you talked about in performance measures, are you working in tandem with other city organizations on those or are those standalone outreach events for community services?

No, everything is city, I mean not city but other organizations events. We don't host our own outreach events like we don't put on our own outreach events because I feel like we don't need to reinvent the wheel. Everyone is doing health fairs, everyone is doing you know food pantries or something so we just support them and tag along.

Thank you.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Thank you for what you do, talk about direct impact to people. So first couple of questions I have are just my awareness. On page 43 of the budget we talk about 50 community grants totaling $443,000 But on your brief community grants, this year is 418,000 projected and 375,000 proposed for '27. I'm trying to figure out what the $443,000 is.

Which one are we looking at?

So in the actual budget that the mayor presented, he talks about 443,000.

I think we're all a little confused.

I'm actually going to have to get back to you with that because I'm not sure why those numbers should not be different.

Okay. If you could do that, that'd be great. As much a level or two deeper than that would be great. And I'll stop asking questions, but that awareness would be great. And then maybe this is also a comeback question as well, but 415,000 actual in '25, 418 projected, roughly the same number, and then we go down to three seventy five, which by my quick math is about a 10% decrease.

What impact does that have on your job? A hard question. I don't mean to make it sound easy, but what what what are we not doing because we're we're decreasing the funding by 10%?

So you have the pros and cons. Pros being we are managing less this year because technically we don't have the capacity to continue to manage as many grantees that we have been managing. You know, it's just myself as a full time, Aaron and Shania, and then we have Dante, our community coordinator that are full time employees, and we are doing our best to try to manage all those, you know, grantees. Given that we reduced the funding, we couldn't fund as much this year. So instead of the original like 62 or 50 this year, we are only funding about 35.

Now that does cut funding for, you know, a good amount of organizations. So that's how that's the con. However, the pro is just alleviating some of the workload of our team, and being able to manage less grants. And I'm hoping that allowing us to manage less grants, we are also a lot more involved with the grantees now. We can continue those site visits and hopefully everyone can sign up and then that we can all go to those site visits.

We can continue reading through the reports thoroughly. We can continue providing the additional support that those grantee needs since it will be less grantees this year. If that answers your question. It does. Okay.

Thank you. And I guess a general question that we could spend two hours talking about, but your grants and you talked about some criteria about repeat grantees and things like that. Do you have a list of guidelines and objectives for each of your grants?

So we have a grant presentation that we'll do and it kinda goes over all of that once we get into that. So, we can talk about that once we get to the the grant, presentation. We can go over that.

Okay. Great. Thank you. Thank you, mister chairman.

Thank you. Yeah. And I hope you guys all know the schedule, but we do have this is longer than some of our other ones so we have time for the presentation on community grants. So we're not like bumping up against time at this point. First of all, I want to really commend your very first slide where you had accomplishments. I loved that you were able to put the cost of those accomplishments next to them. That's really helpful for us. And it was something I saw planning and zoning do as well. And it's just lets us see how investments pay off. So thank you very much for doing that in such a clear way.

I have just a a couple questions about the budgets to actuals this in FY twenty six. And is there any particular reason why salaries and benefits is projected to be over in FY twenty six? So you can't see it on this screen. But the FY twenty six projected, like it's shown up here, it's 516,000. What we had budgeted last year was 495,000. Maybe that's a question for miss Turner.

Could it be the community coordinator, I mean, and the new social worker that we hired maybe?

Yes, it's projected because 04/25,

no, what was it?

Give me a moment, I'll

Okay, we can come back to it. Just flag me down when you're ready. Could you tell me a little bit more about something you mentioned kind of offhandedly, you said you're helping doing AI trainings. What's that?

So for sustainability trainings, I I know we all know about chat GBT and other AI trainings. We felt that a lot of the organizations that we do help kinda still operate as a start up, and a lot of them, you know, they don't have the staff or the volunteers, so we thought it would be great to help them understand and use AI platforms such as ChatGBT to help them, you know, like, with the missing step. Like, that could be your administrator, you know, administrative assistant if you need it. That could be your business partner, you know, if you need to figure out trends or if you need to write a market plan, you know. It's like you really don't have to do it on your own.

There are tools that you can utilize to help you, you know, get to that next level of your organization. So we thought it would be great to have AI training for them.

That's awesome. I I love it. I appreciate you telling me more about it. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy to me how, like, something that might take me fifteen minutes to format a 100 email addresses, it can do it in thirty seconds. Exactly.

You add

that up over a week, makes a big difference. Just to make sure I'm totally clear, you said the children and family success grants in the adopted community are no longer housed in OCS. They're not funded at all in

this program. Yeah, not funded at all.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, thank you. I might have I might put a follow-up question about that in later, that's all I have now. And then we have something called the volunteers at risk grants.

That was the adoptive community grants. Oh, The name was changed. Yeah. Cool.

The case management software. So one of the first of all, we have a $10,000 increase in supplies. Is that not the overall supplies and other category, but the more specific supplies one. Is that for this software? Is that what that's accounting for?

What that accounted for in the personnel enhancements?

That might be a question also for Ms. Turner. Where we see supplies going from 10,000 to 20,000 is that for this $9,600 software?

Yes.

And why is that under these guys rather than under IT?

It shouldn't be under their supplies and other.

What I'm trying to get at, I mean, is not a substantive problem. It's just a question of do we need an amendment to make sure you guys get this but put it under IT's budget so we're consistent.

So there's in the supplies budget, there are a number of places throughout the city's budget. This is one of them where we what we were aiming for was the same services budget which is not necessarily a same dollar amount budget as last year. So one of the places, this is one of the places where there is a change in the FY '27 budget from '26 but it doesn't represent like an overall enhancement. OCS has worked really hard at putting together like resource books and other materials like that to hand out to the community, hand out to partners. They've obviously been working with community partners a lot and so that stuff has actually gone really quickly.

We added some money into their budget this next year to support that continuing effort, but it's not really a new effort.

Got it. Okay. So the software is under IT. That $10,000, it's for something different. Got it.

Thank you. As a and maybe this is a question for the city manager also because it's kind of generalized. But how do we think about whether it makes sense to have these case management and customer relationship management, whatever we wanna call it, softwares be different for different departments versus trying to have one big one for the city as a whole? Obviously, there's trade offs to both, but I'm just curious, like, it it seems to me like it might be helpful for other departments to know what like, OCS might wanna know what how somebody else is dealing with public works or planning and zoning and vice versa. So how do you think about the positives and negatives to that?

Yeah. So this is a place where my my instincts are are not quite in the in the right place necessarily but I tend to separate in my head the ways in which we engage in some of the ways in which we engage with residents and the public. This goes back to my history where all of my instincts are HIPAA related.

Right.

So and I know that that's not the world we live in here but it's still where my instincts are.

It's honestly what you guys said Excel spreadsheet that was where my head went.

Yeah. So think the question ends up being it's for me it's less a question of would OCS benefit from knowing that this person has these other engagements in their life. I'm more concerned about public works knowing that they have an OCS involvement in their life. And that's the distinction that I make in my head is not so much that they shouldn't be able to see the others, I'm not sure I necessarily want the other folks to know they got rental assistance, they got these other benefits. I'm not sure that's necessarily relevant and I know that that comes out of my own personal history, that's not necessarily the world we live in here.

That said, I still think that's actually true. I'm not sure that I need public works to know that.

And you guys will concur with that?

Yeah. What do you think about your case? Yeah. I guess the only thing I would say is, well I guess I'm thinking more in lines of like planning and zoning when it comes to like residents and tenants dealing with you know like a licensing issue or something like you know being able to step in and help.

Yeah, the licensing, so the outreach stuff, the various efforts, that to me could all live under one umbrella, right? Licensing, there's a lot of that that ends up getting connected into like the financial system and that visibility and again so then it's planning and zoning and it's finance and it's it's and it's including DPW and the rest, right? So this is a place where frankly I'm probably persuadable. I'm just trying to be really up front that my this is where my instincts come from. So by default that's my answer.

But I recognize that that's not necessarily the right answer here.

I'll say I mean I think my instincts are on the opposite end of the spectrum but also persuadable that I tend to having grown up in a social media era, think that we're in something of a post privacy world. But that's that's probably also not it's not perfect either. Alright. I did have a couple other questions. I'm just finding them.

Man, I wrote this note and I knew I was gonna forget what I meant later. Oh, this is actually related to community grants so I can wait on that until after that presentation. The last thing I wanted to ask you guys about is same question I asked to the police department. There are parts of their reentry and community work that seem like they can overlap some with or not overlap is not even the right word, but they can intersect with some of what OCS does. And I think there's good reasons why we want them separate, but what I'm trying to get at is at what point do you think, and again I ask the same question to them, at what point would you know that something you guys are currently doing might be better housed with them?

How would you evaluate that?

Good question. It makes makes me feel a little hesitant because Erin sits over at Robinwood and sometimes the police utilize where she sits, but that kind of deters people from coming to where she is because then they think, you know, we're the police, and then they don't want they don't come to get the help that they need. So I'm thinking on that aspect, like, if we were to refer someone saying like, hey, that's better housed over there, would they be comfortable, you know, to say, okay, well, you know, or will they just give up and not get the help? That's how I'm feeling about it, Erin. You want?

I was also gonna mention as far as I'm sorry. I'm mention, capacity as well because I know say if we if Shania and I do need to refer someone to another nonprofit or a church for example, that does take some hand holding because sometimes for folks they may have called 15 other different agencies in that day and I do understand their frustration when we unfortunately we have another voice saying, I'm so sorry but we can't help you. So that is follow-up personal attention, calling them back, emailing, and also sometimes contacting the agency just to make sure that connection was made, as well too. So not doing that for maybe five clients is is great. You know, that's something that, you know, we as social workers can handle.

But say if that number ever increased to maybe more than 30, that would be tough. So just having that capacity to make sure that we are, you know, not only just providing good customer service but also living up to our licensure.

Thank you. How did we oh, I'm sorry. Miss Turner, you had something. You're we were coming back.

Yes. I wanted to answer your question about the projection. So it looks like the projection includes their two temporary people working more than part time hours which is making it more elevated, than the which what is budgeted for f y twenty seven because for f y twenty seven we have them budgeted as part time during part time hours. And that's at a standpoint. So that was at December 31. I'm actually looking at actuals now and it looks like it's still fluctuating. Sometimes they're working forty hours, sometimes they're working less back to the temporary. So it's

Thank you for explaining that. Anything you guys want to add on that?

I was gonna say I'm a little surprised because my two part time people always make it seem like we're not doing more than twenty, and I guess that's something that I have to stay on top of. So sorry about that.

Oh, that's fine. It's no. That's why we asked about it. That's our job is looking through these things. Alright. I had something else I was gonna ask you guys. Oh, the children and family success grant. I know Alderman Chettlemeyer want me to ask about this. How did we determine that that was not worth the investment?

It was one time funded.

Oh, well, that's an easy answer.

Thank you.

Alright. That's all I got. Thank you. Yeah. It's one of oh, I'm sorry. Miss Kati, yes, please. And you might want to move your mic down a little bit.

I just wanted to point out some of the criteria that we had for some of the grants that we were offering and your proposed allocations that you were going to give. When we're making these determinations, what are we using? Like how are we going about, do we like actually know the organizations and what they're providing besides what they're telling us? So do we want to just get into the grant?

Are you asking about community grants?

Community grants. Okay. Do we want to just get into the grant?

Then, yes, maybe we should do the presentation first on that. Do you have anything not related to community Okay. Let's go to the presentation and then we'll ask some questions on community grants and Okay. I'll let everyone go first.

And this is really quick so you probably will have more questions than I have slides.

And just by the way, I think I'm not able to access this within our folder. Okay. Ms. Jackson says she's going to fix it. Thank you.

Okay.

It's fixed already. Go ahead.

Alright. So I'll start with the review team. We have Rosio, Janine, I feel like I'm saying Janine's name wrong. Jeanie, I knew it. Patty Norris, Theresa Wellman, myself, Erin, and Shania.

And of course thank you to all of them for being a part of the WVU team. So this just goes over the priorities for defining operating grant and the capital grant. The operating grant of course supports the day to day of the nonprofit, and the capital grant supports like the purchase of property and construction, but that kind of falls more under like a CBDG grant, I believe. Community grant program, of course, is subject to the availability of funds, so considering if it's the operating or capital grant, the four pillars that it lies under, which is also on the website, and forgive me, I can't remember these by heart so I will read them verbatim, is one, provides services that sustain and empower youth, families, and individuals to move towards an improved quality of life and self sufficiency. Two, provides programs that preserve and enhance a community's character.

Three, provides programs that contribute to a vibrant economy, or promotes programs that are integral to the community revitalization, economic development, and environmental sustainability. So the process of the committee is to review and evaluate each application. So their application questions, and I'm sorry, I should have shared with you all what those application questions are. They were already created when I got here. We didn't change them too much, but I think we probably can make some improvements on on that.

But for the meantime, we've been using what was already in place. The committee submits their recommendations to the Department of Finance to include, you know, our discussion, how we chosen, you know, who will get funding and how much, and also based on what they asked. Each committee person was assigned about seven or eight grants to SCORE, and then we facilitated the conversations and drew up the report. So this year there were 62 applicants. The total request was around $1,000,752 Previous request was $9.95, but the funding pool for this panel to work with was $3.73.

This year, 700. Carmen and I, we kind of discussed a range for the grants this year, figuring out a better streamlined system. So we decided the minimum recommend recommended grant award will be around 5,000 and the maximum being 20,000. There were some some exceptions considered based on the organization's request or to match funding because some organizations asked for less. I guess I'll throw in one thing that I appreciated about the adopted community grants in the child and family success grants is that they had a set amount.

So the community grants really didn't follow that, you know. They can ask for whatever it is that they need and then we it's all decided on how much we should fund them. But I thought to better streamline things, will be simpler to have a set amount, like whether it's 5,000, 10,000, 15,000, or 20,000 instead of, I don't wanna say random amounts, but it felt random like, you know, 3,100 or something like that, you know. So just kinda staying streamlined with an actual amount, unless they asked for it because you'll see that some people did ask for less. So this year, Carmen and I did have a conversation about focusing on the needs.

The requests that we get at the office, you know, the calls and the clients that reach out to us, what the needs are. So we kinda focused on that and focused on those organizations, pretty much receiving the most, you know, based on what they asked for. So that was housing, which is our biggest thing, and homelessness prevention, and of course, food and security and utility assistance were prioritized over programming this year. Well, I wish this was bigger, but this is our scorecard.

I'm sorry. I was looking at something else. Would you mind just saying that last sentence again? You said something was prioritized over something this year.

Oh, so homelessness, housing, food insecurity, and utility assistance were kinda, you know, prioritized over, programming this year because that's the need of our office. Those are the majority of our clients in the cases that we get.

Thank you.

Yes. And

I can share this all with you because I wish this was a lot bigger, but I thought it would be important for you all to see what the scoring card looked like. So focusing on, those four priorities that I mentioned is how we score, you know, seeing which category they fall under, seeing the strong collaboration with community members, schools, churches, other organizations. Something that I agree with Karma with was the programming needed to be at least 75% of city residents. And then, of course, having that diverse funding is something that's really important for sustainability. So showing, us that you had additional funding outside of just city funding.

And there's some more, and I would love to share this card with you all later. So again, focusing on those categories, providing services that sustain and empower youth, families, and individuals to move towards an improved quality of life and sustainability. That category is our largest category, which was $330,700 that we funded. So that focused a lot, again, on that homelessness prevention, focused a lot on utility programs, food programs, and then filling in the gaps with, like, after school programs, summer programs, and things like that. For category category two, promoting community pride and culture enrichment through programs that preserve local history, expand access to the arts, and foster education and sustainability within the community.

That category was only about $5,000 Category three, support free and accessible community programs that foster connection, participation, and pride among Annapolis residents. That category, we funded 10,000. And then the last category, provide programs that are integral to community revitalization, economic development, environmental sustainability, that was 28,000, and that was a match funding. So in summary, there were 62 proposals totaling over 1,000,035 awardees that we decided to recommend funding for so that we can meet the number that we are working with this year. I think we forgot question slide.

This is the last slide, sorry. Okay,

Auditor Roman Conte, want start us off with questions?

So, looking at the proposed like amounts that you're gonna give to some of the organizations, I had a couple questions. One of them is for the assistant league league, and it they wanted I don't know the exact amount. They wanted

School uniforms? Yeah. Yes. Mhmm.

I'm trying to understand why one organization that's covering one school would get that much of a grant over other schools. That's also in these schools like in Germantown where they provide the same services given only them and not giving zero to the other ones. Like, what made y'all make that decision to propose that?

Well, technically, were the only ones that apply each year for the grant. Didn't see anyone else apply saying that they also do what they do. So

What I'm saying is if a school is the majority of the elementary schools that are here in Annapolis, they're community schools, which means that they provide additional services to their kids. So if we're giving them a grant just to say they were going to do uniforms, the other schools need the same thing. So we pick in one over the other ones that apply too.

But I don't know the other schools that apply. The other schools apply that do the same thing because the only schools that I've seen were Germantown and I think Eastport, but they were asking for PTA. They didn't mention anything about school uniforms. So technically, Assistant League of the Chesapeake is the only organization that applied to help children with school uniforms. So that's why we provided them with grant funding.

Didn't think about like, well, there's other community schools out there that do the same thing because they didn't apply. So this is the only organization that stuck out to us because they apply that said we, you know, we give uniforms to, you know, the kids. I forget what school they give them to. And then Tyler Heights and then as I mentioned Georgetown I believe, PTA and I think it was Eastport PTA, I can

get that. Germantown.

Germantown, sorry. They applied for, you know, the PTA not the school uniforms from what I am I can remember. So I hope does that answer?

So I understand it, but what I'm saying is like if the community school community schools get certain money already allocated for them for uniforms. So they're asking for something additional for uniforms, but the PTA, the schools itself, if it's a community school, they get like these wraparound things to help with stuff like school uniforms. So that's why I'm

trying to give a girl

why they made it specific to school uniforms versus saying something else. Yes.

Okay. So technically, again, I don't know the in-depth of, like, the communities I don't have any kids, so excuse me, of the community schools and, like, how the uniforms work, you know. So just seeing that they are already I don't know if uniforms cost, you know, outside of the schools giving them Usually

do, but if it's a community school, it's only three schools that are not community schools, and you always know because if they have uniforms, then it's a community school. If they don't, then they won't have it. But all of the community schools get certain money that's allocated for kids that might be in need of uniforms. So that was one of my yeah.

No, I get what you're saying, but I'll just say they were the only ones that applied, you know. And like I said, we don't really know too much or at least, you know, I don't know too much because no one brought that up. Look, no one brought that up. You know, the committee didn't bring it up like, well, other, you know, community schools do x y and z, so we just went ahead and funded that because, again, like I said, I don't know uniform cost or how that whole process worked, but that does alleviate, some money out of a parent who's struggling to maybe pay for food or something. That's something they don't have to worry about. To take that off their table looks good to us.

Alderman Conte, can I ask, I'm just trying to understand, is the point you're getting at more that these let's limit it to the three schools? These three schools already get money for uniforms and thus we don't need to provide additional money. Or are you getting at more we should spread it evenly among the schools?

Exactly.

Okay. So we could I I think somebody would have to go to those two other PTAs and say, if we give you this money, would you be willing to spend it on this particular thing? But if we were to do that I mean, if someone were to do that, I don't see any reason why we couldn't break that $15,000 into $5.55. Maybe there's some reason, but it doesn't, it's not coming to my mind. So that could be a solution.

So me, you had a conversation. So as far as Salvation Army, they said that they're helping with like utilities and housing and stuff like that. But for years, they've been a known place to only give conditionally to a certain community or a certain vast of people. So how are we like So again,

based on the scoring card that we use is how we determine who will get funding. And forgive me because like I said, I've only been in two years. This is also why we wanted to start doing site visits so that we could actually start seeing everyone's program and the success of it. Because yes, we do have the reports, but it's always good to see for yourself, right? So we wanna make sure that we increase our site visits, continue to get out there, actually see everyone's work.

I know Aaron and I, we went to the Salvation Army for like a BGE training, you know, we know some of the staff over there, and they are a vital, you know, partner to us when we need to refer someone over there. So they also didn't ask for too much either. You know, I think they asked for around 7,000, so it's like don't OCS doesn't have a lot of programs outside of the rental, so we need those additional organizations to partner with us, especially when rental closes. You know, it it doesn't stay open long. We don't have a lot of funds. So once our program is done, we need important organizations like the Salvation Army to cover, you know, us for them until we reopen.

Got you. I got one more question.

Yes.

So the nonprofit organizations, Play Annapolis, One Annapolis, and Kingdom Care, why were they granted zero?

So, Play Annapolis and I can't remember everybody's

Play Annapolis is a sports organization that provides scholarships and equipment to underserved youth to be able to play sports that they wouldn't normally be able to play.

Okay. So I'm a ask I'm a answer this question on application based and not just individual based because like everyone, like I said, they all get, you know, organizations to score and then they score. So I don't know if I scored them or who scored that. So I'm just gonna answer it on just like an application based, depending on what they ask for. So even though that they do provide that programming doesn't necessarily mean that they're asking for the money to use for that.

They could you know, whatever they're asking for determines how we score them. So, you know, sometimes we'll get an organization that may ask for money for a printer or something like that. So it has to be based on what they're asking for, not exactly what they do. And I do know that we have what's the other organization? Miss Womack.

That's an episode.

And that was also, you know, that also, you know, provides like sports and and things like that. And I've I did a site visit with them and they're talking about partnering with, Play Adaplas. But Yes.

On both of their boards.

Okay. So, yeah. So based on what they asked for and forgive me, I can't remember, but I think you all have access to the drive and applications. You can go into the applications and read on exactly what they're asking for, the money for, not just based on what the organization does. Does that make sense? Okay.

Thank

you very much and I appreciate it. As you had mentioned there's a lot of changes that we're looking to make to this and it's a growing experience. Has the opportunity to make some amendments on this and we will there's a couple of them that we want to make amendments and I appreciate everything that the community the committee has done, the selection committee. I wanted to make sure that the explanations on the spreadsheet were current and up to date for this year's. Is that correct that they're all current? The summary

for fiscal year 2020? Yes.

That's all current?

Okay. Great.

I don't have any other questions at the moment.

Okay. Awesome. Alderman Thorpe, you're up.

Thank you, mister chairman. So I think there's several spreadsheets and I'm just trying to make sure I'm looking at the right one. There the spreadsheet I'm looking at has f y 2027 grant request, '26 committee need, and 27 committee recommended list. What is f y '26 committee need? What's the definition of that column?

That might have been last year's. So last year

I should jump in and say I unhid that column in your So if you're like, what? I thought we

did that.

I was trying to find that.

Okay. Yeah. The column was hidden, but I'll explain. So last year, as you can see, the need that is always asked is way more than what we have. So I think we if I'm not mistaken, Vicki, I think there were like two numbers last year that we were giving. So, we recommended based on the number that we were giving, was giving from Vicki, and then the need was based on another number. So we we said, like, if we're going with this number, then this is the recommendation. But if we're going with this number, then this is the need right here, if that makes sense. That's why that extra column was there. But we didn't do that this year,

so that's why we hit that column. Yeah. We've we've tried to be pretty transparent about what what's in front of us, you know, we have access to the applications, here's how much folks ask for, here's what the recommendation is. We did end up with a couple versions last year so there were a couple of versions of that recommendation and then obviously at the end of the day council gets to make its choices. So we try to just show all of that.

I'd like to tell, that when they come to us during budget to get the number, sometimes where we're at in preparing the proposed budget, we don't have a a hard number to give them, and sometimes that adjusts. So that may adjust their selections as well.

Thank you. So, I've now unhidden all of the columns.

I'm so

on you.

I guess my question that I'd really like to know is I see FY '25 council adopted. I don't see an FY '26 council adopted.

That will be once you all make your final decisions then you will have an adopted one.

FY '26, the year we're in now. So last year this time what was there's no column here for FY '26.

I don't have the sheet in front of me and I'm sorry but there should have been one. But I know I do have I know I do have that. So I could share it with you all but

Yeah. Can we just put that as a do out if we could add what the FY '26

Adopt it was. Adopt it

was. Would be really helpful. Thank you.

I'm sorry that was not in there. Thought just hit everything instead of removing it.

Thank you. And then a question that might be a new guy question. I thought you briefed that the criteria was five to 20,000. Yes. And on the in category four here Chesapeake Crossroads Heritage Incorporated receives $28,000 every year. Can you tell me about that?

Yes. So we put grant award is 5,000 with the maximum being 20,000. Exceptions were considered based on an organization's request amount of or match funding requirements. So if they did ask for less, we gave them what they asked for because then that gives us more money to work with. However, Chesapeake Heritage Crossroads, we have to batch funding in order for them to get, county funding. And they also provide, many grants to up to organizations as well to help them. We kinda have to. And honestly, it's just been something that's been going on since I started. Again, I've only been here for two years, so we kinda have to match that funding in order for them to get additional funding from the county.

And I totally agree with what you said but I'd be more comfortable if you said that we opt to match it so they get the match but you actually I don't think have to. You opt to so that they get the matching. Okay. You're empowered to do that, Okay. Alright, thank you Mr. Chairman.

Thanks. I really appreciate this. I know we've been working on making this better and it seems like getting better so thank you. I hope so. I think I was talking with honorable O'Neil about this over the weekend that I think at some point, we might need to make some changes to the code, hopeful. And so maybe that's something that we can have as a finance committee hearing. I'm coming up with all of these ideas over the course of these budget hearings for things we need to bring folks back for when we're not in the middle of the budget.

I would love if you could throw in a a grant management software.

Oh, okay. Interesting. I should have put it as one of your names.

I should have put it. I didn't think of it at the time.

Two I'm not gonna agree on all these, but I do have two in particular that just jumped out to me. Okay. One is the black to the Chesapeake application. Last year in FY twenty six, I remember their founder had just died. They didn't put in an application.

And

this year, we're choosing not to fund that, which might be perfectly reasonable. But I just want to ensure that the not putting in an application in last year, which the council that went and corrected and we we would so what I'm getting at is this would show up as in FY '26, the committee's recommendation was to not give them any money. The council understood there were some extenuating circumstances. We made sure to go in and appropriate that some additional funds for this. In this budget, I see they're not getting any money, which again might be perfectly reasonable.

But I want to make sure that the not putting in an application in FY twenty six and thus having a committee recommendation of zero in FY twenty six was not a factor in that?

No, it wasn't.

Okay. Thank you. And then the other one, not to come after my pal to the right over here, but is the funding for the Eastport Volunteer Fire Department to get AEDs. We just heard at the last council meeting how important it is to get AEDs, but it also is in a category here for something like supporting culture and history. That strikes me as not about culture and history. So, could you just explain that one a little bit more?

We let everyone on the application pick where they felt they fall under. So we didn't classify that for them. So we asked which category do you feel you fall under? They choose it. We put them there. Okay. Yeah.

So you guys were basically looking at this and saying, boy, AEDs are a really important thing. They might not be important for history, but they're important overall.

Yes. They're important overall. And then someone on the committee mentioned that, I guess, someone was playing pickleball and actually needed AED. So, yeah.

We're hearing about it the council

this past week. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I'm not gonna try and grill you guys over all these. Really appreciate your work on this and creating better processes. Anybody got anything else they wanna talk about on community grants? Are you sure not, alder Roman O'Neil? Sure? Okay. Alright. With that, if we could just get the information out of the spreadsheet of f y twenty six adopted. Yes. I think that was our only due out. Oh, he does have something.

Having looked at the other columns, if you're gonna add '26 you you might I noticed you have 22 in here. It might be good

to have. I was gonna say, I'm I'm just for transparency, the sheet was already done before I came on board. I just continue to follow. Oh, no. I appreciate it. But but

twenty six, twenty five, twenty four would be helpful.

Okay.

If you have it without doing making it a research project.

Okay. Hey. Maybe chat TV two would

be helpful.

Or I'm sorry. Google Gemini. We're we're a Gemini household here.

I don't think I don't think chat GBT will have the numbers from that.

No. You feed it in. Well, think Get it to put in the spreadsheet. Anyway, alright. With that, I think we can wrap up. So let's say I see director Morris here. Director Morris, if we were to get started at eleven instead of 11:20, would that be alright with you or are you waiting on folks?

Waiting on someone, but we can probably start.

Okay. So we'll I'll recess us for fifteen minutes. And if we're not ready then to get started ahead of schedule, then we can recess again. But let's, is there a motion to stand and recess for fifteen minutes? So moved. Second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Meeting call back to order at 11:07 a. M. On 05/04/2026. Thanks everybody for being here today. And director Moore, the floor is yours.

Thank you, chair, and good morning, everyone. For the record, I'm Marcus Moore, director of transportation. And with me is

Kwaku Ajimenduwa,

our deputy director of transportation. We're pleased to be here with you to share our and present our FY twenty seven budget to you. And we will not read every slide, but however, we'll do our best to answer questions that you might have as they come up. So looking at our accomplishments we have here for transportation and parking. And you look at security and safety and security, excuse me, securing the grants and funding to run operation from the state and federal levels.

You can see the 900 plus $6.84 comes to just about 1,500,000 in federal state grants for the capital side. What this is allowing us to do is maintain reliable on time service and we can talk about how we get those statistics and the service delivery. We always want to be at 100% means that we have on time pull out. There will be issues in between that will bring our on time performance down to something less than 100. And we'll explain more about what that zero accident rate is and how it's obtained from the FTA and the national transit database how they arrive at those numbers.

Accomplishments for parking, as you can see, we're trying to maintain when you look at something that says a strong enforcement, we really mean like a consistent measure to make sure that parking is adhered to according to city code and the number one factor would be safety for, you know, safety vehicles, police and fire, fire hydrants and making the turns around corners well hurting property and all. Improving the signage and wayfinding, we're in process of doing that but we'll talk more about what our goal is for FY twenty seven and how we're gonna increase those initiatives on the street and our lots and garages and also, and how that'll work out best for us. But doing that in this current year where we're where we're in, we really had a very comprehensive review of what we're doing now. And we look at accomplishments as we tie the performance measures to our budget, things that are under our control. So when you're looking at parking, it is within the area that we are responsible for which is outside of the concession area.

The concession area will talk about it a little bit differently and how that is being maintained and worked on with us. So as we talked about the performance measures as you can see here, the FTA, Federal Transit Administration uses the primary use of how they come up out with this data using the NTD, National Transit Database, is calculator for smaller agencies like ours, 100,000 vehicle revenue miles. Larger agencies might have as much as 1,000,000. But what makes it a FRA reportable accident? Was there a fatality, an injury that was treated away from the scene?

If a vehicle could not operate under its own power because of safety, meaning taillights, marker lights, and all. So far in fiscal year this fiscal year, we had about just over 463,000 miles. In FY twenty five we operated 488,000. So you can see what the benchmark is and our goal always should be zero but there's a factor of what's acceptable. So you can see where we are, what we've done in FY '25, year to date FY '26 and with the proposed FY '27.

Things do happen but they don't make that threshold to be FTA reportable. Adherence to preventive maintenance and programs, our goal is 100%. What that means is when the m t a m d o t m t a does an inspection of our records making sure that the monies that we get for preventive maintenance are being used in accordance to the contract of us running public transit. Are we doing preventive maintenance schedule, in line with, keeping these vehicles, operating for its full useful life? And we have.

Over the last several years we've been hitting the market 100%. And a note later on this afternoon we have our quarterly meeting with MDOT MTA to look at records again. And they'll sporadically ask for four or five three or four buses to take a look at to make sure that for the last year to look at the how we've maintained them. And you can look at the performance measures there at the bottom for how we operate. So when we talk about the Federal Transit Administration and Maryland Transit Administration and the requirements to follow the rules in compliance to get these monies in reimbursement.

One of the last couple council meetings we did talk about the application to apply and we have been doing our due diligence of making sure we keep our title six, all the other requirements of drug and alcohol program, not just a nine to five but all the hours that we operate in compliance. And this NTD reporting is done at the end of each year. I think it's October 31. So we've come out very well with that. So we're pretty excited about how we've been able to continue to operate at a level that's above the average.

So the performance measures as I made mention, this is just on the outside of the concession area and what our performance measure is and where we hope to be going forward. You can see the benchmark that we have there of 85% ensuring that, you know, the districts are covered daily by, you know, wandering around and making corrective action as we made mention specifically on the safety issue. So what the actual numbers show there for FY '25 and year to date, month to date for where we are in FY '26. We'd like to be at a 100% realistically, know, the 99, you know, '98 is where, you know, we'll we'll end up coming in. And we'd have had several months of course at a 100% keeping that average pretty high.

The other performance measure there with the parking you see the percentage of meters in compliance and working. We've outperformed pretty much our benchmark by just a few points and that probably goes back a couple fiscal years when we were able to replace the single or dual head meters for multi space meter allowing that to be the technology to be updated in better working order. What we like to do also, you know, the performance measures for responding to, you know, all complaints even though we may have say here valid customer complaint, but we don't know if it's invalid if until we investigate it. But having a benchmark of about 95 is where we've been really hitting it. And what we're saying is, you know, within a couple days, within two days, we've been very good.

And some of you may have been the recipient of the emails from one of the parking contractors of how they followed up. Other statistics, this is a real interesting one because you're looking at what is it that we're actually doing. And when we look at, you know, the free rides that we give for students, this was several fiscal years ago. I wanna say FY '17 or '18. K through 12 can ride for free weekdays during school time between 6AM and 7PM.

And you look at the numbers there for the actual for FY '25, and where we are year to date for '26. And to kinda put that in context, you can see what the total ridership is, for those years. It's really hard to give a projection or proposed number of riders. We'd love to see, you know, numbers growing so fast so much that you want to just continue to give us more money to keep continue to expand our our routes. Some of the other statistics that you'll see here is our participation in city sponsored and community events.

Year fiscal year '25, about a dozen there that you can see and so far we've three. So giving you some ideas of what those are would be parades, other events where we had a cooling bus, a warming bus first night, middle of the summer, fourth of July is a big one because we don't operate transit service but we operate, free service from the the Navy Stadium to Lawyers Mall for people to go down to see the fireworks. We have, you know, five buses doing a round robin from, like, 04:00 in the afternoon until 12:30, which requires a supervisor to be on duty as well. That's probably one of the biggest ones, but if you think about military bold and all the other events that come up, and even times, even though we have the Israeli barriers and dump trucks and all, sometimes we're asked to use an older asset to help block traffic to protect those that are in parades. So you can kinda take a look at some of the things that an idea of what other statistics are that we don't get a reimbursement, but it's just the right thing to do for city sponsored events, community events, and things that we go out to kind of share about transit.

Parking garages, when you look at transit transient volumes, these are considered, you know, day people. People there for a few hours up to a day, not monthly parkers. So there's no real goal on how many people will come in. We just wanna make the ease better, the apps easier, and the response time of doing things that we get to visitor center and other places like town halls where we can show folks how easy it is to sign up. So you can look at f y twenty five actual, you know, over over 417,000 transient, usage of in the parking garages outside the concession area where we are so far year to date.

No real proposal there forward, but it will be nice to use something like we'd love to increase this 10 every year to 20%. So you got the on street parking and the revenue that is generated. This is just revenue for parking, not citations. So the actual for f y twenty five. Where we are so far in year to date in '26, but there's no real proposal, but we can actually answer any questions that you might have.

That's year to date for '26? Just

Yes.

So we're very much outpacing FY '25, right?

We are. More spaces, more people being you using it. I think a lot of the things that we've done for helping the businesses, just getting folks out, it really really has grown. And then, you know, the the collection or, you know, peep I guess the other pot would have been those that were still there but weren't paying that went to a collection part. More people are paying because they're figuring out how easy or how to use the app. But it is outpacing for sure. Okay. Budget enhancements. Before you ask the question, I know you have one. When you look at personnel enhancements, say none.

But you're gonna see FTE increase by one and what that is is just a transfer over from another agency. That person was working both it was being shared from different agencies and it was just decided that it'll it'll work on our agency that our agency and the funds have come along with that particular position. And we can discuss more as need be for your interest. Next. The non personnel enhancements largely go around parking, way finding, signage garages.

And and, you know, if we go back to a couple pages, don't have to go back, but you may see that revenue really going up because, you know, building it and they will come, but they don't know how to get in the front door is really hard for Park Place. There's so many ways to get in. You know, we have a shared asset. We're the minority majority owner with with Guardian as a minority owner, and there's so much activity there, and that's our largest asset of 1,100 over 1,100 spaces. Can you imagine if we're able to, you know, get a capacity several times a month what that will look like?

So just getting folks from highways where we can get signage to get into our garages and then once they get in the garages, which way do I go and how do I pay? So there's a lot of money being that's being, you know, gonna be invested to create a seamless journey of you coming to Annapolis and how do I get there once get there once I get here. And you'll hear us talk more about gorilla posts and those are really neat post marks that you can use for parking. That instead of using those cones or sticking the stick in between you know the grassy knoll and the street sidewalk, They really work a lot better and they're flexible as far as bending. You'll probably have seen some of them in other garages.

There's no damage to the vehicle. So that's a really big event that we really think will really help us out a lot when we have specials. You know, the holiday parking between Thanksgiving and New Year's Day and so many other things that we wanna wanna do. But that's where we're concentrating our efforts when we look at non fare revenue. That's parking and how that supports the the transportation fund through the general fund and we can talk more about that. We'd

like

to get into trends, budget trends, and I'm gonna ask for our deputy director to help explain some of these things away. But you'll see some things that will be a question mark to you like what is contractual services? What is it all covering supplies and other in our capital outlay?

Thank you very much. So this shows the budget trends based upon the template. We do have the FY '23, '24, and '25 actuals. Just a couple of points in terms of the capital outlay. Normally that is when we do get grants for vehicle replacement or equipment. So what we decided to do is take that one out.

It's our fifteen minute time. I just wanna try and wrap

it up.

Okay. So we took that one out so that you can look at the trend without the capital outlay which depends upon how much we do get from year to year for vehicle purchase or equipment. We also have the same one for parking. The numbers are there. If you have any questions, we'll be very glad to answer or respond to that.

Revenue side, we do have the transportation fund. We do it by fund because there are two funds in the Department of Transportation. Just on the FY '25 actual, at that time, we still have a lot of money from the federal government, I believe is the upper funds, so that actually also saw an increase in the transportation fund. Revenue versus expenses, very interesting here. So what we did here is to take the for the transportation fund, the non city funds as a percentage of the operating cost, I.

E. How much of the operating cost is paid for revenues that we generate ourselves without any city funding. So that is where we show the 35.61%, meaning that about 35.6% of the operating cost is paid for from sources like grants, fair box, advertising revenues, and things like that. And it also shows you how much the city actually contributes to support the transit services in the city of Annapolis. We do something similar for parking fund.

A little bit different here because in the parking fund, in the operating expense, there is a large amount of money for interfund transfers. We decided to take it out and see without doubt how does the parking revenue actually compare to the parking actual parking expenses. So when we do that, then we do have enough money being generated through the parking activities to pay for its own expenditures. However, when we add back the interfund transfer, then we need to look at other sources of revenue to actually help pay for everything else. Additional information here, expansion of community outreach.

Our transportation superintendent has been doing very well going to various senior centers, the visitor center schools just to send the word out in terms of our services that we provide. We also actively collaborate with county and the state partners. We do have monthly meetings with the county department office of transportation. We also have our quarterly meetings with the state in addition to anything that may come in between. Believe so that is the end.

Thank you very much. Alderman O'Neill, do you wanna kick us off? Former transportation chair.

Thank you very much. I appreciate all those information. I have a couple of questions. When you go back to one of the first couple of slides, I didn't write down the slide number and you talked about the on street

What?

Yes. The on street parking revenue going from twenty five's actual to the year to date. Does that include fines?

It does not.

That is purely residential parking permits, meter payments.

It's all, the actual fees to park, not the fines.

It's to park. Okay. Thank you.

Can I drill down on that if you don't mind? So it does include residential parking permits or it does not?

We're on street. Believe it does include that as well. Okay.

Alright. Thank you. And then the biggest thing that I hear people ask for is increasing the hours for the Annapolis GO shuttle. Hours and locations. In your proposed f y twenty seven budget, how could we do that?

Money. We really would like to look at the whole system and make a holistic approach take a holistic approach on how that actually works because Alderman O'Neil, I I totally agree. That's worked out quite well. We're still in the pilot phase. We have about fourteen more months.

July, 2027, we'll need to make a decision on how it operates and do we continue to operate and then we'll need funding to actually do that. As that works itself within the other rainbow routes, the brown, the green, the red, how does that go with it? Because this one as a pilot initially was starting out to replace the underperforming orange route, which was just Monday through Friday from 05:30 in the morning to seven. And we also decided to add in that other second underperforming route, the purple route, which is Monday through Saturday from 7PM to 10:45, which covers the whole city. With the orange, it only covered a a good portion of the middle of the city.

It didn't hit the transfer or the turnaround points of Eastport or the mall. So we really would need to really study how we do this without losing too much on the other fixed route because a lot of other places, jurisdictions that found success with it, it was a feeder system that went into a hub that carried you to other locations to go other places. But it's definitely something we need to look at. We'll we'll have we need the help of transportation planners on how we expand that footprint a little bit further because I totally agree with what you said based on the calls that we get. You can only use this service after this hour. We'll cover the whole system.

Thank you. We heard a little bit last week, and I can't remember which department we talked about it in, about credit cards across the city. And that's the second most often question that people ask is why can they not use a credit card to get on one of the buses or, you know.

Well, the two faceted. When you buy a ticket at our location, of course, we can accept credit cards and checks and the like. With onboard, we'd really have to be tied in very closely with finance. So just like the permit window or somebody else buying, some other commodity from the city, how that ties in with how we do our financial reporting. On our side, we've been in con communication with other agencies that we can tie in with that can do mobile payment.

And what does that mean? And some if you don't have a high volume, you're gonna lose even more money because you're gonna have to pay that percentage to use that credit card, Apple Pay, or whatever in the wallet. It's not unrealistic. It's just something that needs to be studied and as a group effort with with the finance department and how we we grow that part of it. But we've been looking at it and we can definitely give you some feedback on our findings from the transit side.

One other thing that we we went to this electronic fare box back in 2016 or so, there are a lot of components that are really easy quick disconnect. It's unfortunate that the MTA, the largest agency in the state, they use another one. It's called Genfear and we're fair we are TripSpark, but they can modify so we can accept their cards and them, accept ours. And some of the things we'd like to talk to you more about is that reciprocating environment where somebody that buys a daily, monthly, yearly, whatever on MTA, if they come into the city on the 70 bus, they can continue their journey to the mall or to inner city neighborhoods. Someone doing that same thing on our service cannot reciprocate and use the set that same pass going that direction.

So one of the things is just how we balance ourselves out to incorporate this new mode of payment. It's something that we want to do because there's certain generations that they don't carry a wallet or carry money in it. And that would definitely be a plus.

Thank you.

Don't have any cash at all in my wallet right now. So yes, I appreciate that. I think it's just to me it's about obviously, there is money part of it, but there's also a how do we have people fulfill their civic duty when they want to? And I think I've told you before a story about a friend who it's like a great like, super excited to ride transit and got on the bus one day because it was raining and normally bikes to his job and was like, oh, I can't pay. And the guy just said, ride it anyway. We wanna have the the sense that everybody's being fair and playing by the rules. So, anyway, that's not a question. Alderman Thorpe, you're up.

Thank you, mister chairman. Thank you, mister Moore. Appreciate all the work you, put into this and your team and and, I appreciate all the time that you've spent to continue to make it better. My questions are hard and I'm just going to put you on the spot. Slide five.

Do you really not have an estimate of ridership of your buses in fiscal year twenty twenty seven?

We it's you wanna take this first stab.

When it comes to transit, we are in competition with Adam Moss of Transportation. Typically, if you're doing a new bus route, you have an idea of what is the expected ridership based upon various land uses and socioeconomic characteristics. Once it is well established, asking people to come and do the service is something totally different. What we do have control of is the bus is available, is supposed to be on schedule, is clean, is safe, and then we advertise it with the hope that people will actually take the message. If we want to target choice riders, it means that we need more money to be able to run the buses more frequently during the morning and the evening rush hours.

So putting a number on how many people you expect to basically take the service is hard unless we do previous trend analysis and say on the average, this is what we expect. That we can put a number to that based upon say five years of average data. We do that with a safety plan. We go back three years to look at all safety events and based upon that, we will put in a number. So we intentionally did that but if you want to see what could happen then for the past five years we can calculate the average.

I'm not a very fun person of averages because if you have a lot of variations in the data, it's your average the most likely event to happen but we can actually take a look at the averages for the past five years and use that as an indicator of what we hope to achieve in f y twenty twenty seven.

So let me go a different way. What are your top three ridership routes?

Yeah. Let me Well, doctor DeWise, looking at that, one other thing to keep in mind of pre COVID, post COVID, right, excuse me, ridership numbers, we're probably up to, like, ninety five percent of our ridership pre COVID. How do we attract

Sorry. They're gonna be hard.

I didn't mean to. One of the things I guess that we're looking at yes, please. Oh, okay. Thank you. One of the things that would really help us out as far as marketing and as we do our thank you so much.

Our community outreach to the senior centers that didn't know about GO time or ADA paratransit service and all. So part of that we can look at the growth but what took us all the agencies in The United States have taken a decline and just pulling ourselves back up. Before that happened, you know, we didn't really have a lot of teleworking and all that kind of stuff and people to some agencies companies really found that that was a good way of a mix x amount of days per week to work from home. So as doctor Duo will be able to tell you the top three routes that we have right now and how they're faring.

Yeah. This is up to date for f y twenty six at the March. The number one is the magenta downtown Shadow. If you look at it, it is where it's the center of town. Many people come in. It's free and it's connects to all our parking garages. Formerly called the circulator, it was designed to connect the parking assets so that people can park and move freely and also help businesses. So that is our number one. Up Just to date

special for you guys presentation today. I made sure to take the magenta shuttle to City Hall this morning. Just a few minutes.

So that's number one. Number two will be the brown, and number three will be the green. The go time, Wuchinau, consists of three or two different routes. The former Orange and the former Purple North and South is now around 22,500 riders. ADA is the least used service but it's for people with disabilities.

And I think the reason why we don't have many people using is that the county has a similar service which is free but it has long wait time but that is a complimentary service that we have to provide it because we are set for that dollars too. So that is what we have. I can get to much more detail for each route for the past five years. If you're interested, I believe you saw a question from Savage which is asking for about five years of ridership by route and by the service type. Service type, currently, we do have the fixed route which is the brown, the the green, and then the the red.

And the shuttle. And the downtown shuttle, they are all fixed route. And the state shuttle. Yeah. The state shuttle. Actually, I Yeah, that's a high number too but I don't have it here. But we can provide you with all those statistics if you're I

would appreciate that but I'm less interested in the data than knowing you have the data because what you just illustrated to me was that you could have the ridership goal of 2027 because you do have five years of history. So what I seek to do is to create an environment where we eliminate the fear of being wrong. In other words, I think what transportation is all about is predicting what the ridership's going to be in the future and then making decisions to change things to increase or decrease the ridership. So somebody might say let's charge for the magenta shuttle. Okay.

That's gonna decrease the ridership. But, you know, I I know that. I'm not a transportation expert. But but so that's really what I seek. On on that slide five, I I believe we we really need to drive to having goals. And I would like to impress upon you not to fear being wrong because we can work through this and you know, I've heard now numerous times the discussion and the and I've seen the work that you all are doing. But but if we don't measure the output, we won't know what it is.

Ms. Sukland wanted to chime in I think.

And I just wanted to add on to that, that sort of redefining what is wrong. I think part of what I, you you and I have discussed in the past is something like this in particular, what are our control limits? What does normal variation look like? So let's not get fixated on what the exact number is. We should have some ideas but just that understanding that there is normal variation and this is within normal variation or now this is outside of normal variation.

Yeah. Could not agree more. Right? And and what I'm looking is is an understanding of the data. I mean, if we have if suddenly it starts raining a whole lot more, you know, if we have a year of a lot of rain, it's gonna affect bus ridership in one way, shape, or form. So I'm really looking for the cause and effect, and I could not agree more with what the acting city manager just said.

But although what we do in terms of doing certain things and seeing the impact on ridership, when it comes to fair change, when it comes to service reduction, when it comes to service increase, we do what is called elasticity of fair change, elasticity of service increase or service reduction and that we have the tools to do that. In fact, when they did cut the circulator for the first time, we did estimate how much it's going to impact. When they did cut service and increase fares back in 2014, we did estimate that it was going to be, readership was going to be reduced by 33%. We were very close, it came to about 30%. So there are two when it comes to those, but in the future I think you go back, look at the data, use the averages, the median, or the mode which one we see best fits our environment and then we put it down there as our aspirational goals at least.

Yep. And I would just like this committee to get more exposure to that kind of data. On that note, what does it cost per rider on the Magenta shuttle? Zero. No, no. I know it costs zero to get on it. What does it cost the city per rider on the magenta shuttle?

Yeah. Because the the Magenta shuttle primarily is part of the parking contract. That is why it is run by Reston. So we do have the ridership numbers. We can calculate on the average how much it cost based upon the contract value. I do have the data but I don't have the exact answer that you're looking for.

Yeah. And and that was a demonstrative question. I would like to get to that in the future. And I think you clarified something in that the per rider cost is not just a city cost. It's also state and and other funding. And I would like to get to that.

Can I add on to this just

No? To No. I'm kidding. Go ahead. See, I'll keep you

on your toes. To demonstrate there this is not always as straightforward an answer as we would like. So the magenta shuttle is actually a really good example. It's actually a shared service. Reston does part of it and the city itself does part of it.

So the rest in cost in some sense is somewhat more straightforward just because it we know how much that contract is worth. They're under SP so not directly overseen by us so there's a little bit of complication there. But the numbers for us are actually more complex because there are a number of different ways to calculate that. These poor guys went through a sat through a very long session with me so that I could understand where some other numbers came from. The FTA has some requirements about how some things get calculated that are not actually helpful from our perspective.

How we tend to look at how things cost is not how FTA requires them to do some calculations. So we end up having to ask them to do in some sense sort of a second round of calculations to answer those questions for us so that it's a little bit more apples to apples. It's a good question. Part of what you're hearing from them comes from this background of that's actually a more complicated question than you think it is. Is that fair? Yeah,

remember the conversation.

Were using It's from Yeah. From my conversation.

She came and used the full hours from the time that the droves punches into the time that they punch out. FDA does not use that kind of time interval and we have to go through all the data again. But it's doable. We do have the numbers. We do actually segregate the ridership by our bus on the magenta shuttle versus that of Reston and we also separated the revenue miles and hours on on our bus versus Reston so we can provide you with that kind of data.

Yeah, thank you. And that ends that series of questions. There's no doubt about it that this is hard. And I want to make sure you all have the confidence that as we as I look to get more granularity on this data, it's not data for data's sake. It's how can we best support the Department of Transportation in order to maximize the quality of our transportation. So, I look forward to working with you on that. So I have one other question that's different, and that is, why did we stop the electric shuttle in Eastport?

Those were pilot, operations as well, and what we wanted to do is to redeploy our assets to help City Dock. That was really the number one driver. We have two carts to get more service down where you can't park at all to go to City Dock. That was the number one driver.

Do you track the number of riders on the electric shuttle? Yes. So I would be very interested in returning that electric shuttle to Eastport at some point in the future. Not tomorrow, not next week, not but there is a strong feedback in Eastport that that shuttle was exactly what we needed to get people out of cars in Esports, specifically the Peninsula, but quite frankly throughout Ward 8 and there is a lot of feedback that people could have gotten used to doing that. So working together in the future, not a do out for this brief, I would very much like to talk to you about returning that shuttle to Ward 8 in the future.

One of the things we can definitely look at because I think I've seen some of the other presentations about 5%. So we may not have to redeploy something but add into what we were doing. So we found we got it right the first time with the Calvert Street, West Street, Maryland Avenue coming back in. We may need to redefine the route in Eastport, but we really want to get all the way down to, you know, what is it, 2nd Avenue and coming back in. So even when city dock is done, that may still be good there because there's gonna be a bit of less parking at that location.

You know, the parking's been moved to Hillman. So there's probably that need to have another one. So when we look at instead of redeploying assets somewhere else where they're needed most, how about adding to what we found that's growing? I think we provided you with data for last year on both carts. If you can't locate it, I can get that resent to you today and I can give you what we've done so far since we started this which was the weekend before, the weekend after Easter, somewhere around that period.

It is a fair weather vehicle. Even if you say it's only 90 degrees, I'm only gonna be there for five minutes. The driver's there for seven hours. And that kind of thing and then, you know, water and you know, that kind of stuff. So we hope to go March to October, November, but some there's sometimes we just can't. But I would like to see that grow.

I would very much like

to track that data. Please. Yeah. Please.

Yeah. So talking about the shadow in the esports, automat service made an budget amendment in f y twenty six for Esports shuttle. So it is now in the planning phase that we are looking at and look at what are the best options to do. The other piece is the electric ferry or now the hybrid ferry. Part of the program is basically the EV cars in the Eastport area to take people to 5th Street landing so that they can hop onto the electric ferry.

So there are some plans here and there that actually could provide that kind of service in the Eastport tied either into Audemarsavage's proposal or into the ferry program.

So thank you. I just want to be crystal clear and say that the hybrid ferry is not in any way shape or form a replacement for overland transportation, public transportation that's desperately needed in Ward 8. And second of all, so thank you also for that study. Alderman Savage and I were on the call. I think you were on it As we look at what those alternatives are, my feedback for you, while that is tremendous and that was also a possibility that we talked about, my point to you there is a significant demand signal for the pilot program that you created.

And in my humble opinion, as the behavior was starting to get modified to support it, the pilot ended. And so that's why I'm enthusiastically looking forward to bringing that program back in a way that we measure it and demonstrate the success of it if appropriate. So thank you.

Thank you. And I'll just say on that, you might think Alderman Thorpe and I would be butting heads over whether he gets it or I get it, but I'll tell you my instinct is that it is more effective in Eastport than downtown, where we have a lot of other options. But I could be convinced otherwise if you've got the data to show it.

So But you don't need to work hard on convincing them otherwise.

No. You're the one always saying work hard on getting some more data. I'm not sure if this was in your presentation or not, but there was a figure that really struck me as worthy of praise in your performance metrics going in f y twenty five from about a $110 for operating cost per hour down to $89 in f y twenty six. Seth, is that on any of the slides?

No. It's not.

It's in the Yeah. I can relate to that. The 110 is based on to date. So looking at the entire calendar year, that is that is also another metrics that we also track and report to the state and the fed. So you were using that metrics that we will get there.

Right. Yeah. It just seemed like you went you dropped it by, I don't know, 20 18% something like that. And oh, I'm sorry. Miss Buckland, you got something.

Yeah. Mean, this is actually why we had to sit down where where these guys have PTSD from my very long questioning session was to understand what why what are those numbers, where do they come from. And so there are a couple there's a reason why they're not here. There are that's a measure that I would very very much like for us to change this next year both because I think there are some timing issues with how that gets calculated and reported and then that difference between how FTA looks at things and how we look at things also drives variation in that number in a way that is not helpful for our decision making. So I would really, that's why it's not here, I would really really like for us to revisit some of those measures for next year to have them be more consistent, repeatable and then reflect what we're actually trying to get at in our own decision making.

Got it. Well, I tried to give you guys a compliment sandwich. It seems from what I'm looking at, it seems like a really good improvement. I understand maybe there's some reason for that variation. And I'll say, yeah, the the other part of that was going to be seems to me like it would be better to do operating cost per rider than per hour. But that's the kind of thing that I defer to Ms. Buckland in her non acting role on for figuring out those performance metrics. What other department did that transportation service worker come from?

It was the old DPW, new central services.

Got it. So if I were to go look in FY '26, it would be in central services or it would be in

'26. Yes.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

Sense. Thank you. Can you tell me a little bit more about the ADA service? You started to talk about this deputy director, and I wasn't quite clear on what you were saying. Is this is it mandated by law that we have yes. Okay. I'm seeing you nod. Yes. And so if we were to look at our, like, ridership per dollar or our cost per ridership figure, that would probably have the highest of any of the routes. Saying? Yes. We we have to have it. Okay. Well, I'm not gonna spend a lot of time trying to mess with that. The let's see.

I think I we had special projects last year that changed. You mentioned at one point that on July 4, we run a bus from Navy Stadium to Lawyer Small. Awesome. Love it. If we had funding for it, are there other events where you think that would be feasible and advisable?

Sometimes we'll get questions. Can the city support operating a bus which would be a charter that we couldn't from the stadium to, let's say, Williams Wayland. The reason why we're able to operate the bus from stadium to, Lawyers Mall, that's the route of the, state state shuttle. We can do that. We're not because of federal funds able to make a charter whether it's for hire or for free because of those funds.

So when the city does say yes, we will support whatever that community event is, we will usually go to Reston or they can go we give them ideas because we can't at all, do that type of a charter. Yeah. What we wanna do, I think what your question is, how do you change a route, expand a route, improve no?

No. No. I'm saying it's keep this the route exactly the same from Navy Stadium to Lawyers Mall, but for things other than fourth of July. Like, would it make sense for Midnight Madness? Would it make sense for, I don't know, the Saint Patrick's Day parade? See,

the July 4, we're not running anything. But midnight madness, we can just run longer because during session on Mondays, we run longer, to 10:00 at night. And then it was requested from the governor's office this year. We we go to 08:40 at night. We can stick Monday through Friday, 06:40 to 08:40. And then Mondays, we go to ten. So it was asked by the governor's office this year, Tuesday through Friday, we can go to 09:00. So operating that same time frame, what we could do is do the same thing a little longer. So if you found those those first three Thursdays in December, we wanna do that. But what we have done is ran the Magenta shuttle longer to 01:00.

Right. Free service. The other one is a part of our fixed route, so it's 1 or $2 depending on the category. Yeah. You wanna add, please?

Just a comment on the charter service. It's one of the few things that we report with every quarter and it's one of the two things that requires signatures. Just a reminder. And we do have our charter policy. I think we have given them out. But if you are interested, we can share with you what the FDA regulations are with respect to special services.

Got it. So going back to the the Navy Stadium, DeLorean small part. If, say, hypothetically, miss Nolan in the the city manager's office comes to us and says, boy, we're we're doing this new event downtown. It's the traffic's gonna be crazy. Navy Stadium has agreed to let people have transportation there or or sorry, have parking there. What would you need for her if she came to you and said, boy, I wanna run this for that day, what would you need to be able to do that?

Along those same routes, that you just made mention, that regularly happens. I think I saw, in the city manager's presentation that Felicia has, like, a 125 events like that.

Right. And if

you look back at one of our pages of other statistics, continue to participate and support city sponsored. Last year, we had 12 of them. And, you know, some of those met that criteria that you just made mention or asked about. Some of the assets that we have are not federally funded, are those carts. So sometimes we can put those in anywhere.

We still gotta pay the labor for the driver. So it's really great if the mayor's office, city manager's office say, I I can I can have somebody drive that cart, ride that bike, or whatever else? But putting it in a parade or so, remember, we can do a rescue off route. If we gotta get to higher ground, working with OEM, you know, looking at too cold, too hot, firefighter rehab. Those anomalies is not a planned event. So but what Felicia's office would need, we would just really need to look at it because those come up regularly. So a lot of times we know if it's a yes, no, maybe, or do we need to go get approval from the city manager or the mayor's office?

Sure. Thank you. That that just strikes me as one way we could really alleviate parking congestion, traffic congestion. So I'm glad to hear that. What I'm hearing from you is basically, it is possible already if there are situations where we need it.

Yes.

This is kind of a weird one, but just you mentioned event security. You just mentioned it again. And, we're gonna be talking about that at a a briefing later this week. Could you just offline connect with the city manager and see if we think transportation needs to be part of that, that we make allowances for that? And Ms. Buckland will know what I'm talking about. Okay. Thank you. Special speaking of special events, the special signage that you were talking about, could you just tell me some more about that? Is this you mentioned like the holiday signage.

Is this for more permanent, or is this for more, like, one night of the year events?

The majority is more permanent, for wayfinding, how to get there from here. I think you were gonna chime in or something. Some of

them Yeah. Are

think that there's been a general push in a number of places for better way finding for a variety of reasons. We've done some of that for city dock construction and stuff like that. And I think in general I think that has sort of sensitized us to the need for better way finding in general. Obviously bet here is that there is in fact an ROI of making it easier to find where our parking assets are. So that's what's supported in the budget is a lot of that is permanent signage.

But there were two, categories. If we can go back to the slide under, enhancements. I'm sorry. Which one?

Under enhancements?

Yes. The enhancement slide. Yeah. There we go. So I'm asking about the second one. The signage during major events. The example that you gave was for, like, when we do free parking around the holidays. Right? And that sounds good. But what I really think is maybe even more necessary than that is, like, having a vertical not vertical, variable messaging board that we can put up, say again, I'll use the example of Midnight Madness. Put that up and say, don't try going down to Hillman. It's full. Go park in Nighting Garage. Is that what this is for?

Not quite. Those are terribly expensive. I think the city has five, and they are deployed from public works and the police department I think has them for those type of events. There might be three or four, but they'll put them up always as you come to downtown through Bay Ridge Avenue and then on West Street and all. We're the non dynamic signage more, you know, I should say stationary, but some of them, as we learn each year, how to better say pay before you walk away, and you have to interact with this to get the two hour free hour free of parking. It would be good if we had a general city budget for more of those dynamic signage, but that's not part of this.

Right. Could you get back to us with a number for more some more variable messaging? Because I know they're expensive, but I also do think we have a a use for it.

Yep.

We answered that one. Marketing. The note I had down here was as we're talking about increasing ridership and ultimately I think not I think. I absolutely agree with what I think Alderman Thorpe was getting out of making that a performance metric. Is there have there been discussions around what would it take to better market our bus system? How we would do we need a staff member for that? Do we need more supplies? If if somebody were asking you for a recommendation of how do we better market it, what kind of money do we need to do that?

That's a really good question that we battered around and and doctor Duwao will be able to give you some examples of real life situations in ADOT fifteen years ago. We actually had that position and we can share how we went out to the community more than what we're doing now and what that benefit was.

Yeah, it's a very beneficial marketing specialist for instance created kind of a web book that was geared towards children with various ways to move around the city and she went to the schools and then gave out those workbooks, they took the workbook to home and guess who worked with them, the parents who may not have even heard or know that there is an app for transit. So during those times, there was an active engagement at the city level, businesses, communities by the marketing specialist to basically let people be aware. She also did training how to use a bus. A classic example was the people who go to around the lodge, they used to be bused. That time with the effort of the marketing specialist, she was able to train them how to use a bus from the Aranda Lodge, transfer at the mall, and they use another bus to get to their group home.

So these are some of the things that were were done in those times and I believe in 2011, that position was defunded and since that time we have not been able to we have not failed it. We have worked closely with the mayor's office, the PIO to do some kind of marketing but in the TDP, we do have a recommendation for a more robust marketing program.

Nice. Yeah. And and I think that, would be really important to increasing ridership. What I'm trying to get at is I'd like to be able to defend whether the best ROI is gonna be for us putting that into supplies, putting it into a staff member, putting it into some kind of contractor. And so it's probably not going to be in this budget, but I I would just say as you're thinking about maybe what we wanna even look ahead to the next budget, being able to come back with what's the ROI for each one of those categories would be really helpful.

Personally speaking, right now supplies would be it because we have a very robust staff with a parking program manager, superintendent, supervisors that, you know, when we're invited, we come and then we knock on doors to invite ourselves and hopefully we're let in.

So you and me both.

Yeah. So one of the big ones is visitor centers you saw in our presentation. We do call miss Peronis twice a year to get to her staff because those volunteers are ambassadors for the whole city.

Okay.

So when we come, we come with both parking contractors and our transportation folks, our parking program manager, and a list of questions. And they'll videotape us and use it for other engagements, but we try to do that in October before the Holly Rush. We try to do that in spring to let them know what's going on, whatever has changed. So, you know, the last time we did this, we actually invited public works the project manager for city doc, Matt and Jeff also came. Matt Kelly, the project manager, and Jeff wants our our traffic engineer to kinda explain certain things that we, you know, more of the technical but in layman's terms.

So I personally believe that we have the bandwidth because it's not something that comes up every single day once a week. We we we may have those 12 or 15 events and they're only an hour. When any of you have asked us to go to one of your town halls, ECA, or anything that may come up, that's our opportunity, to share more about it, because it it really helps just really that those unmet needs of the population that just like I'm gonna all get together and get a Uber or Lyft and it's like, really, I can take GO or a d a you know, the ADA bus will take me there? They don't know. So us getting out there and educating it educating our our our community of residents that don't have other options.

Yeah. Yeah. I tried to take good time over to visit Alderman Thorp's ward not too long ago, go to Adams, rather than an Uber. And it was kinda it was kinda cool to have the the options. I'll tell you in that case, I forgot why, but we did end up taking the Uber. But alright. Alderman Conti, do you have questions? Okay. I just wanna know how quick I need to be with these remaining ones. Either you guys got anything else? I have

one more.

We have one more. Anything else? Okay. I'll be fast. Quick one. The part time drivers pooled is set. That is a total number of people, not a total number of FTEs. Correct?

The but it's what is the number we have there? Six? Because those are at twelve twelve of those are those are positions, and we were building them together, Suzanne, to where FTE. So you would see FTE being six.

Okay. Got it. Thank you. That's what I wanted to understand.

And we'll check we'll double check that number, but that's what we were reporting as FTEs versus the actual part time.

Sure. Yeah. I know it. We we kind of are swapping over this budget, and it's a little bit squishy in a couple of different places. The, one of the areas that's called out as an accomplishment, which sounds great to me, is the collection rate of fines from issued violations being 76. Do you guys have with you or can you follow-up with us on what it was previously?

Yes.

Yep. Okay. That's great. Thank you. Alright. Just two more things. As we are swapping over in the past and probably doing more in the future to more electric buses, do we feel like our staff, our maintenance staff are adequately trained on being able to work on those?

We continue to get more training for them as it comes up. Purchasing these buses, BYD has been very supportive of sending someone down and going alongside of our techs to teach them on the job training kind of thing. We've had a couple codes that we did need their help to have them cleared or understood. As you've made mention, there's two more smaller buses that are in the pipeline that we probably won't get to the end of this year, probably early next year, like January, February. There are smaller ones.

As more training comes up, you know, we really wanna look at it, you know, our our training budget because part of our grants like 1% should be used for training. We could always use more. You know, that's one of those things that we're not gonna rest on our laurels and say, yeah, we got it. We could always use more.

Great. Thank you. Yeah. And and maybe we should check on that two more coming because I think the 100% electric mobility plan in the capital budget, as I'm reading it, it says funding was removed for two battery electric buses. So that would be a shame if that's the case. Oh, was flared. He's here. Do you know anything about that? The this is under funding changes, and in that 100% electric and appless mobility plan, which, of course, includes the ferry, but also includes our buses and and go karts. Not go karts.

Suzanne. Suzanne Flaherty, budget analyst. You're speaking to the capital project itself? Yeah. We removed it from the capital project itself because the they were funded under the transportation department. So they were basically double counted. There were some under CIP and there was some under transportation. And so we do have to update that CIP page though because now that that ferry has been signed off on, that page needs to be updated.

So I just wanna make sure I understand. This says funding was removed for two battery electric buses and two buses which were purchased under the operating budget with grants. That reads to me as there were four budgets, two got funded with grants, and so we took those out, and then we also took two additional ones out. Miss Turner is shaking her head no. Which one do you guys want to answer and tell me why

I'm wrong?

So for for the large electric buses, one of them was 100% funded under our grant application. The other was grant funds that was originally meant for a diesel bus and then the city decided to go electric so the county came alongside, gave us some 250,000 and then the city did add. So those projects have been completed and the sources of funding were different. So I worked with her to suggest that we did remove that. The other electric bikes, I believe you are referring to the EV cars that were purchased.

So those have been that project has been completed. So what is remaining right now is the ferry and anything related to that. And even at that time, because the city has not signed the ferry agreement, we weren't sure where to put it. But now that the city has signed, she sent an email that I really need to put it back in so we will actually revise that one to refer the current status of funding. And specifically, the ferry thing was special grant just for ferry. It was not part of our normal grant application or request.

It. Ms. Flaherty and Ms. Turner, anything you need to add? No? Okay. My very final well, we're almost at time. Actually, I'll I'll give the last five minutes, Alderman Thorpe.

So just to continue, the ferry agreement is not decided to move forward yet. Correct?

No. It has been signed so we can move forward with the ferry. Currently, the procurement officer is and public works is reviewing the RFP for the design, engineering construction of the landing site primarily 5th Street and also looking at the designs, engineering and building of two ferry vessels. So we are moving forward with that. If you do recall with the change in administration at the federal level, there was a delay because the administration thought that the 100% electric ferry is not feasible so we had to change the scope of work from 100% electric ferry to hybrid.

So that was part of the delay and therefore the agreement has to be changed and signed by the mayor. I'm glad to say that the mayor did sign it. So the funds have been obligated by MTA. So we are ready to move forward with that.

Liz? Yeah, so my understanding is that we have continued to reserve that money by signing the grant agreement but that the full scope and scale is still under discussion. So I think that that's I think that is still in the works. I'm not aware, although this is not one that I follow day in and day out. But I believe there are still some discussions about what that actually looks like.

I am 99.9% sure that the fund that we had to sign the document because of a deadline but that there no decision has been made at all to do anything with the 5th Street Ferry Landing.

In terms of the scope of work, that has been under construction. Whether to move forward, that has been under our review for some time, but that doesn't mean that the city can't will move forward with that. The same thing with the grant agreement though we have signed, if the city decide at one point that it doesn't want to move forward with the project, All that we need is to send a letter to FDA saying that we don't want to move forward with that. And this is will not be the first time the city has done that where we sign a grant agreement for money and later on the city decided that and now we don't want to move forward with that.

Right. It's just a it's not semantics when the the the public answer from the city has been the decision has not been made to move forward with a hybrid ferry, end of statement, which is very different than the decision has been made to move forward but can be changed. So maybe we should just take that as a due out to confirm exactly what the situation is there.

By that what I mean is that once you sign the agreement it means that you can move forward with that. But that doesn't mean that you have to do the project. If you have not signed a grant agreement, then there is a deadline and there is a stop. Right. And you cannot move forward with that. But when you sign, it means that if you want to go ahead, okay, the funds have been obligated and we can use it. It is in that sense that the city has signed the agreement and therefore the city can move forward with that.

I would maybe put it as a distinction is the decision has been made to move forward but that doesn't mean that the decision has been made to finish it.

No. It it that's fundamental that's absolutely what is not the case.

But you're moving forward. Right? You're doing things for it.

No. That that's exactly what mayor Littman has been very clear with the residents of Eastport is that he has not made the decision to move forward. The signing of a document that had a deadline, he was specifically clear that that was not a decision to move forward but had to move he had it had to be signed in order to maintain the possibility of moving forward.

I don't understand. That is moving forward. That's taking a step forward. Right?

It's a it's a the difference is process versus the the public decision to move forward with a ferry. Two different topics. And and the the the process has to move forward in order to maintain the possibility of of going forward with a ferry. But mayor Littman has not made the decision to go forward with the ferry. And that is a very strong distinction.

I'm not gonna spend too much more time on it. But you had another question?

I did. So back to the electric ferry pilot in Eastport. As I sit here and think about the math, the mobility study will go forward in the months ahead and next year we'll get a response. The electric shuttle, the go The mobility? Yeah, the go fair the go shuttle, the two electric shuttles.

Would it be possible if the city council was to add funding for a third one of these electric shuttles to have three electric shuttles in March '27?

That was, the point I was making earlier having to decide to move what was working here to help out those businesses. Let's not make that decision of which is the favorite child, add a third one there for next year. We need to make some changes around because remember, this is not a transit route. So it cannot be used by transit dollars. So the folks that we hire, are non CDL drivers that's paid out of another pot.

So, you know, having that third person or, you know because when they're not driving even the wintertime, they're doing other things, helping out with the bus shelter maintenance and other things around our property. But we need to have that discussion with our our finance folks here how we make that happen, make sure we're properly funded through city funds to achieve this goal.

So I would like to ask if you could put that number together in fairly short order in case the city council were to opt to fund a third one of these and arguably to begin operating in March 2027, if that would be possible. Thank you.

Thanks. Sure. Alright. We are at time. Unless anybody's got anything pressing, I got one question I'll put for follow-up. But I think we're ready to adjourn.

Thank you

for your time.

You very much. I'm sorry. Didn't say thank you for

your time.

I appreciate it. There's a motion on the floor to adjourn with a second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Meeting adjourned.