City Council - Regular Meeting

This is Karen Edwards. To her right is deputy city attorney for litigation and claims George Prothrow. To my left is deputy city attorney Kimberly Patrick, who is over the airport division and legal operations. And to her left is deputy city attorney Cheryl Ringer over municipal governance. We also have deputy city attorney Sharon Broach, who is over operations.

And then we are honored to also have members of the Department of Law who, of course, very essential to the team and the chamber audience. So if they could just stand or wave their hands. Thank you so much. The Department of Law is vested with the exclusive authority and jurisdiction in all matters of law and legal services related to the executive and legislative branches of the city Of Atlanta and every department. We are the sword and the shield of the city, protecting both the city's public fists, defending it from litigation, and enabling both the mayor and council's administrative and policy goals in the best interest of the city government.

The duties and responsibilities and authority of the city attorney and the Department of Law are found in both the Charter and the city's code. Now since the beginning of 2026, when I was confirmed in this position, the Department of Law has made significant strides in strengthening its operations and in continuing to invest in the future of municipal legal services. We have tightened our internal processes, improved accountability, and enhanced our budget management to ensure that resources are allocated strategically and transparently. At the same time, we have been very intentional about cultivating a pipeline of the next generation of municipal attorneys, creating at every opportunity that we have opportunities for early exposure, mentorship, and hands on experience that is focused on preparing emerging lawyers for the unique work of public service, specifically here in the city. We have also hosted training programs for our attorneys and staff and also for other attorneys within the city, emphasizing substantive knowledge, professional excellence, ethical leadership, and customer service.

And these have been at no cost to our attorneys or other attorneys within the city. These efforts ensure that our team is not only equipped to meet today's challenges, but are also positioned to lead in response to the challenges that we anticipate facing us ahead. Together, these innovations reflect our commitment to operational excellence, fiscal stewardship, and retaining the history and knowledge of the professionals that have served the city in this department for decades and especially towards building a sustainable, strong foundation for the legal professionals who will serve Atlanta long into the future. I want to present you all with our FY twenty seven organizational structure chart. As you can see, I've introduced the deputy city attorneys to you.

They sit directly under me in this structure, But the legal and administrative functions of the Department of Law are divided into five major divisions, airport legal division, legal operations, operations, litigation division and claims, municipal governments and strategic business services, which also encompasses our real estate functions. The airport legal division serves, of course, as counsel to Department of Aviation, which operates, of course, Hartsfield Jackson Airport. This division provides advice and counsel on a variety of commercial matters such as real estate contracts, procurement, local and federal legislative matters, and federal regulatory laws. The litigation division and claims group handles lawsuits in which the city of Atlanta, its employees, elected officials, and agents are named as defendants. This division handles tort litigation, employment matters, and constitutional claims, and various other types of matters that may be filed in both federal and state court.

This this division also will defend against appeals of judicial and jury determinations in litigation both at state and federal appellate levels. The claims group, which also is a part of the litigation division, manages claims filed against the city of Atlanta in accordance with state law. The operations division serves as counsel to both the legislative and administrative branches of Atlanta as well. Specifically, the professionals in this division include the, they serve the Department of Watershed Management, Transportation. They manage the SAVE E Verify Compliance program.

The operations division also provides advice and counsel to the Department of Human Resources. They provide legal advice regarding operations and legal functions and give advice on an ongoing basis related to personnel matters to try to minimize claims and lawsuits. Just to give you context, Amber Robinson, who is sitting here, is a part of of this operations division. Strategic business services provides legal counsel and contract services, of course, to both the legislative and executive branches of Atlanta. Specifically, the professionals in this division serve the departments of AIM, enterprise assets management, grants, parks and recreation, planning, aviation and procurement.

This division also provides legal counsel on commercial transactions, including contracts, real estate matters and land use matters. Finally, the municipal government's team leads council and contract services serving the Department of Finance, the Atlanta Police Department, Atlanta Fire and Rescue. They service multiple boards and commissions, including the defined contribution pension investment board. This division also lead is legal counsel on commercial transactions, including municipal financing and tax matters. Each deputy city attorney has a division chief and following there are deputy division chiefs and other counsel and supervisory attorneys, claims managers that help operate in that division as well.

Kimberly Patrick will give us a deep dive in some of our ongoings and FY '26 accomplishments and our year in review. I will just give a summary of our service highlights. Again, the Department of Law is very similar to the Department of Finance and it being one of the few departments that services the entire city of Atlanta government. And so a summary of our service highlights, we are proud that we have continued to keep the main thing our main priority, which is providing comprehensive and excellent legal services across the city of Atlanta. And so in that, we have, of course, responded to various legal requests from city council, the mayor, and other city officials and departments for opinions and advice on various legal matters.

We have assisted in responding to open records request and ensuring compliance with the Open Meetings Act, advising on zoning matters, assisting in city bond financing, representing and defending the city in various lawsuits, providing ongoing support and advice in reaching compliance with consent decrees, advising city departments on employment relating issues, and providing training as well. And I will ask deputy city attorney Patrick to give you an overview of specific accomplishments.

Alright. Good morning. Kimberly Patrick, deputy city attorney for the airport division. As you know, the law department has a phenomenal group of attorneys and they've done a lot of good work in fiscal year twenty six. And I want to talk a little bit about how that work has aligned with the mayor's goals.

If you look at the pillar of a city of opportunity, for all, we have provided all legal services required to support activities regarding the city's hosting of the twenty twenty six FIFA World Cup. We provided all of the advice and counsel and legislative drafting services, which led to the amendment of the City of Atlanta code of ordinances to formally establish the mayor's office of One Atlanta. We also co hosted the mayor's senior wills event on 08/16/2025 and 11/08/2025, and provided critical estate planning documents for income limited seniors. Moving on to One Safe City, we prepared acquisition documents, easements, right of entry agreements for several complete street projects, including Cascade Road, Central Avenue Bridge, and Camelton Road sidewalk rehabilitations to provide safe access to pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists, and transit riders. We secured facilities for APS and AFRD, including the upcoming fire station redevelopments in high need parts of the city, specifically the redevelopment of a fire station in the Lindbergh Complex.

Moving on to the pillar of a city built for the future, we, the law department, hosted three continuing legal education seminars in March on March 20, March 27 and 03/30/2026, which provided training and development on legal topics important to the city of Atlanta. We also provided legal services to the Department of Aviation for the expansion of its indooroutdoor antenna system to more efficiently provide wireless access to the ever needing ever expanding demand for cell phone and wireless device accessibility at the airport. And this will go a long way when FIFA comes to Atlanta in June. Also, a city built for the future. We provided legal services to facilitate the transfer of surplus Department of Moorshed land toward the development of an affordable housing project and grocery store near 1270 West Murrieta Boulevard.

We also led the negotiations of the franchise agreement with Google Fiber Georgia for the installation and operation of its FTP network. And then finally, the effective and ethical government pillar. We hosted the law department hosted a training with staff from the office of the mayor and office of the city council president on how to effectively and efficiently process the intake of claims and lawsuits. We conducted a training session with the Department of Human Resources directors on interpreting sections of the personnel and labor and relation chapters of the city code, And we provided legal advice and counsel to all departments in compliance with the mayor's administrative order 2025 dash o two regarding ensuring compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good

morning, madam president and members of okay.

So Mayshere Bailey is going to actually talk to you about the numbers, but I wanna give you some context in terms of when she discusses those with you. And as you all will probably notice when I'm before you, I always give it to Mayshere Bailey to talk about the numbers because she knows these better than anybody. But the Department of Law has strengthened its budget management through a series of very intentional operational improvements. Our deputy chief of finance, miss Bailey, monitors our budget numbers on a daily basis. I meet with miss Bailey and the department's budget analyst, Kiera Brown, who can wave her hand here in the audience on on a weekly basis at a minimum, but oftentimes more to discuss where our budget stands, anticipated needs within our department and across the city that may impact the Department of Law's budget.

When I came into the role, Ms. Bailey already had implemented very tight fiscal controls, and so our work together has been actively engaging in processes regarding enhancement of our tracking and forecasting tools, as well as clearer accountability measures across our department and across city departments that we service. So this focus ensures that the resources that have been allotted to the Department of Law are used strategically and are aligned with the city's priorities. So together with Ms. Bailey and Ms.

Brown, the deputy city attorneys that are here, and all of the members of the Department of Law who are committed to being good stewards of our processes, time management, goals, these efforts, our efforts are creating a more disciplined, proactive, and sustainable approach to managing the Department of Law's budget. We have streamlined our role in management and oversight of contracts that live in our department to a degree. We're ensuring that scopes of work are clear, tied to a need, and that monitoring and management of that work is clearly established. And to the extent that deliverables are appropriate and are necessary, that clear expectations are established at the outset. With respect to the management of outside counsel, we have been able to hire a senior attorney who has been assigned the duty of outside counsel management.

In addition to her other duties, she'll be working very closely with George Prothro, our deputy city attorney for litigation on early establishments of budgets with outside counsel strategy development and case management to ensure that litigation of cases is thorough, is efficient towards speedy resolution to the extent that that is possible, to the extent that there's budget savings there and efficient to the degree that we can maintain that control. We've standardized our documentation for litigation budgets for case evaluation and settlement analysis, which allows us to compare and contrast when we're looking at similar issues and evaluating case resolutions in the best interest of the city. I will pass

it to miss Bailey. Thank you, madam city attorney. Good morning, madam president, members of the Atlanta City Council. Thank you for the opportunity to present the f twenty twenty seven proposed budget on behalf of Department of Law. We're moving on to slides 11.

FY 2027 position count by FTE by fund. As to the FY 2027 FTE count for the Department of Law, there are 85.76 FTE's across the operating funds and 3.24 FTE's in the aviation renewal and extension fund. So a total FTE count of 89 when you include the aviation renewal and extension fund. As to filled versus vacant positions across the operating funds, there are 81.93 filled positions and 3.83 vacant positions. These are all funded positions.

If you include the aviation renewal and extension fund, there are 85 filled positions and four vacant positions. The vacant positions are all attorney positions. The current Department of Law attrition rate is 7%. The Department of Law attrition rate in FY '25 was 22%, so much higher than it is currently. I'm going to move on to slide 12.

So let's dive into the numbers. The total proposed general fund budget for FY 2027 is $13,500,000 a slight decrease of $61,088 when compared to the FY '26 adopted budget. So as to total personnel and benefits, the proposed budget is $5,900,000 a decrease of $61,088 This decrease impacts the benefit line items, specifically group health insurance and the defined contribution plan where projections are slightly lower than anticipated for FY 2027. As to the purchase contract to services line, the total proposed budget for 2027 is $7,400,000 a slight increase of $4,811 when compared to the FY 2026 adopted budget. When you look at the general fund purchase contract to services actuals in FY 2025, you'll notice a fiscal year spend of $10,800,000 and that is related to class action lawsuits, civil rights, and social unrest litigation.

While spending in these areas are beginning to decline, we are now seeing an increase in spending across affirmative litigation matters necessary to protect the quality of life of all Atlantans. Given that these matters are difficult to predict and to project, the Department of Law has been working with our partners at the Department of Finance to capture affirmative litigation matters in the non departmental litigation budget to help better align the FY '27 purchase contracted services budget. As to supplies, there was a slight decrease of $4,811 when compared to the FY '26 adopted budget. The increase from FY '25 actuals to FY '26 adopted and FY '27 proposed is due to technology upgrades, PC and monitor refreshes. As to other costs, that budget will remain flat as we are anticipating costs in FY 2027 related to business meeting expenses and the annual CLE seminar.

So at this time, I'm gonna turn the presentation back over to madam city attorney.

Thank you, miss Bailey. We would like to confirm for you that we believe our proposed budget allocation is appropriate and sufficient. We believe it adequately represents the Department of Law's ability to represent and defend the city's priorities for governance, compliance, and legal defense, but also provides the department with the ability and the agility to respond to the climate outcomes and operational needs of the city. I'm confident that the department's budget, is sufficient as that's my confidence is built on several key factors that I explained to this body earlier that rest primarily in our budget chief, her management of the budget, our smarter spending, our streamlined processes, which can often be difficult to accomplish in a department of law, but I think we've been quite successful in doing that in FY '26. So thank you very much, and we're open for questions.

Alright. Thank you very much for the overview overview of your proposed FY twenty seven budget. We're gonna open up for questions from council members. We're gonna start with council member Hillis.

Thank you, mister chair. Thank you, madam city attorney, for the presentation and your team. Just a few questions. One thing we hear a lot about is laws continued work to hopefully reduce the reliance on outside counsel. I know we have a lot of bright minds in the law department that we can hopefully rely on more and less on outside counsel.

So what strategies have you implemented since coming on to hopefully reduce the reliance on outside counsel? And perhaps relatedly to that, on your overall budget, how much of the 15,500,000 in purchase and contracted services is specifically for payment to outside counsel?

I will have our division chief answer that question and then I'll answer the other part of the question.

So as to the, outside counsel allocation for the general fund, that amount is $6,600,000.

And so before you get to that, just the part b to that, then what else is under purchasing contracted services other than outside counsel?

So the other expense categories that are in purchase contracted services are expenses related to temporary staff, court reporters, expert witnesses, mediation and arbitration services, Thompson Reuters legal research, operating lease equipment, court filing fees, wireless expenses, postage, printing, training, travel, and memberships.

Gotcha. Thank you.

Thank you. And to your question related to out counsel, I I wanna reframe it a bit just from for my purposes and how I have seen the use of outside counsel and how I have utilized outside counsel since coming in the role. Our personnel resources in our outside counsel oftentimes serve mutually exclusively different functions. And so I I don't believe that we have a heavy reliance on outside counsel as supplanting the resources that we have and the talent that we have in the department, but our outside counsel is actually a compliment to that. And so the way that I look at this, if we had in our budget several additional millions of dollars to say hire 10 additional attorneys, it would not dispense with the need for outside counsel.

Oftentimes what happens is I'm looking at the number of attorneys, the volume of cases. Oftentimes the cases that we send to outside counsel are extremely complex. They're specialized and they're they require technical expertise that you may not be able to fill, even if you looked for specific attorneys that had that skill set. Specifically, there are other reasons that we have to use outside counsel. So I will give you an example.

If I receive a if we're served with a piece of litigation and there is the city of Atlanta sued and say seven or eight other officials, because of our rules of professional responsibility, conflict rules, it is impossible that internal attorneys from a responsibility and conflict of interest standpoint could represent all of the different defendants. So we would absolutely be required to retain conflict counsel. And what that means is we may have to get seven additional attorneys as conflict counsel at seven different firms because of the potential or foreseeable conflict. So we have to manage that in terms of reservation of rights and how we use outside counsel. But, of course, what we are doing is we are being streamlined in that sense.

But if we try to shift the all litigation internally, I don't believe that that will relieve budget pressures. In fact, it would add to budget pressures. Right now, we have about 13 attorneys in the litigation department that handle litigation and eight support staff. If we were to add a series of additional internal attorneys, it creates long term budget pressures, including salary benefits, technology, the need for other support staff, and we would absolutely still need outside counsel. We are being, as I stated earlier, careful and cognizant of the types of cases to the extent possible.

We try to keep routine matters in house unless it requires outside counsel, complex bonds, civil rights, class actions, federal overreach litigation that is going to consume an attorney's time when I've got attorneys that are maximizing their caseloads. The best way that I can explain that to this body, greetings, is the same way we look at protecting our public safety, police, and fire from from burnout and exhaustion. We have a professional responsibility, ethics malpractice, and we have to make sure I have to protect them from that. So if they're handling values of cases, I work with our attorneys daily on strategy myself, managing their caseloads, seeing where they are. But what we're also focused on is there are areas where we can try to minimize the cost, and that's where we're seeing our changes.

That is making sure that our claims are investigated thoroughly. There is less of an expense to the public fist if we can resolve claims early at our claims division, because most of those claims are the ones that end up in litigation. The other thing that I have been looking at is evaluating all of our existing cases to see if there are opportunities for early resolution where I know we may just end up in protracted litigation to end up in the same place. And so being good stewards. But what we're also committed to is again the document processes that we have, the management of outside counsel, early case strategy because we can get from outside counsel and our internal attorneys early case evaluation from beginning to end.

Then I know that their strategy will be more efficient, which means that their use and expense of the public's monies will be more efficient. We're also committed, and this is in a direct really could correlate to a direct line item. We're committed to working with other departments and divisions in being proactive so that we hope matters do not reach litigation with our increased training, operational compliance, working with them on that instead of just being reactive in terms of legal defense.

Thank you for that. What does the department and maybe you in particular since you have come here use as performance metrics? We hear a lot in our more, you know, public facing departments about, you know, departments SLAs, from Watershed, ATL, DOT, DPW. What do you see and what can you present, as that you use as evidence of a properly functioning law department?

Absolutely, thank you. And I I think it's a great question. I think that it's two parts. There's an internal evaluation in terms of how our attorneys are serving the city, but there's also the external evaluation of how we are serving other departments. And I can evaluate that in terms of conversations with my fellow cabinet members, commissioners, figuring out what we can do better, what we can do more of, but also looking at how many repeat matters that come to us that we can be more proactive on as well.

When I got into the department, there were already standards that the department had set of goals, and some of those include sense of urgency. They include efficiency. What I have focused on is making sure that our department, as I stated earlier, keeps our main priority that which is delivering legal services in a comprehensive way that understands the necessary nuances of government. Looking at how litigation is handled, seeing if strategy can be developed, working with our department to see how we're evaluating procurements, how we're supporting, how responsive. It it feels like low hanging fruit fruit.

How responsive the attorneys are to me, how responsive they are to you, how responsive they are to other members of the department. A lot of our outcomes are not necessarily born out in the city, but they're born out in the courts. They're born out in the mediations. They're born out in the settlements. And when we I know that we have set and we have considered all of the interests that are important to the citizens of Atlanta to evaluate those outcomes and make sure you're in the best interest.

Oftentimes you can't see that in the numbers, but we can see that, and that's what I try to bring to you all in letting you know about cases, letting you know the actual risk that we've avoided there, the actual exposure. But it's really making sure that our attorneys are committed, that we're getting the responses, that if we can get to yes, that we're doing that, that we're trying to accomplish the goals, that we're not being stopholes and barriers to what the city needs and its priorities.

Thank you, madam city attorney. I'll, keep it at that and defer to my colleagues, and thank you, mister chair.

Alright. Thank you.

Councilmember Hillis.

Next, have questions from councilmember Martin.

Yes. It's more of a comment. I just wanted to say thank you for the I've been around city government for twenty five years, and I've always respected our law departments. I've very effective. But what I'm noticing very early about this one is you all are going above and beyond, you know, practicing law and getting in our communities and really helping to lift, and that's extremely important. Number one, help citizens understand what government is all about beyond just trash being picked up and when you dial 911, the police show up. But helping them understand that it's a lot of work that goes into managing a what we're discussing is not a $3,000,000,000 city. And and so thank you all. You all were waiting and willing to come and help clean up my madam president's beloved Cascade Nature Nature Preserve. We're gonna get that rescheduled as soon as possible.

I'm looking forward to us doing some work with our seniors around living wills and testaments and really even engaging with our young people around how they can pursue careers in law that, you know, maybe in entails them taking the bar one day or if it's just being a clerk or being a a paralegal. So I just wanted to say thank you for that, that innovative work. And I think, you know, as I think about what my colleague said about Dustin, what Hill has said about, you know, outside counsel, I think that's always a conversation to be had, but I do understand the complexities of the work that you all do and how it sometimes can be beneficial to have expertise in other areas doing that work. But I do think we shall always be looking at, and I think you all are committed to doing that and ensuring that we're, you know, spending the the public dollar the best way we can. So thank you.

Thank you, mister chair.

Thank you, council member Martin. Alright.

Thank you. Council member Worthy.

Thank you, mister chairman. Thank you, madam city attorney. I apologize for my tardiness, but I was listening to the beginning of this presentation, in the car on the way over. As someone that's a member of an in house law department myself, I would love to present a budget to my boss, that that looks as flat as yours. So kudos to you and everyone on the team, especially since litigation is something you can't predict, and you've gotta respond to it.

And so really, kudos to the budget you put forward. My only my only question is, can you elaborate a little bit on y'all's work with procurement? We had procurements presentation yesterday and we know that they are completely revolutionizing their systems in that department doing great work. I defined it yesterday as anytime you change a system, it's it's pure hell at the beginning, and then it ultimately gets better than it was. And, I think, the procurement chief yesterday said, we're now at the point of just having a little bit of hell left, we're almost there.

How is the law department working with procurement to try to ease that transition into a a period of time where the procurements are going quicker?

Thank you. And all of our deputy city attorneys, and we work directly with procurement, but I would ask deputy city attorney Edwards to answer your question.

Good morning, council members. Thank you for the question. We work very closely with the procurement team. We are participating in the beginning in their new strategy programs where we are able to hear what the goal is, what the, purpose is as they try to decide which method of procurement. And so law gets to ask some questions, be able to begin thinking about what needs to be done related to the contracts, the type of contracts that would be necessary, etcetera.

We have a automated process where they will send us the documentation request for services. We respond to them within three about three days to say, okay. We need more information, etcetera, etcetera. And then we try to get, documents out. We also have templates ready.

And when they send the notice out, it is with the templates that we expect to be used, the the form of contract that we expect to be used. If a, a person who is putting in a bid has changes to it, they must send their changes in at that time, and it's part of the overall review. So we are able to say, wow. That's a lot of changes. It's gonna be very complex. It's risk issues, etcetera. So we are trying to help in that way to make it, to support them in their Smoothing out. Sorry.

I had Yeah.

Well, thank you for your support. I know that change is hard. Change was a long time coming there, and I'm excited to see the fruits of their labors, and thank you for your support of that. One last question, and I think it's probably premature to talk about it in '27, but so this is more of a put it on your radar. But as a practicing attorney myself, I am equal parts terrified and excited about AI changing our profession.

I think we're on the front end of that right now as Claude and ChatGPT becomes more commonplace, and and you certainly hear stories of AI tools writing briefs very eloquently and then citing cases that don't exist. So yeah. Exactly. And so, I I think we're certainly on the front end of that, but I would encourage the department to keep a huge grasp on that because I think that next year at this time, we're gonna probably be talking about that a lot more in, you know, is it going to become the next Westlaw and LexisNexis or is it going to be the bane of our profession TBD? But I trust that somebody in your department is is is watching that closely.

Thank you. And if I can just add, thank you for both of those. I would just add to the procurement piece. Deputy City Attorney Edwards is they're doing a lot of training with procurement as well and also other departments. And so while that training is related to procurement and contracts and other divisions, what you would feel is some smoothing out in the procurement process as it trickles to procurement directly.

And so when they're continuing to do in training, actually have a training program to address some of the things that we're seeing. So in trying to be proactive and operationally compliant In in terms of technology, it's something that we're always thinking about. Technology makes things faster, and that can be good or that can be bad because what that also means in certain contexts is that it just makes our mistakes show up quicker. Right?

Very very

well very

well said. Exactly.

I am in the business of building and training attorneys. And so I think that is very important as we look at AI or all of our technology. You know firsthand that most law departments, most law firms tend to use 20% of the technology they have, which is why you don't see us asking for for money for those things. What I had been focused on in that respect is evaluating our current technology, evaluating our resources, and first making sure that we are squeezing every ounce of maximization out of that. And Taya White, who is our director of legal operations here.

I've been working with Taya very closely to make sure that we're utilizing our subscriptions, that our attorneys know what we have, but that there's also training and ethics around that. If I asked you all for $1,000,000 for AI and other things, which you didn't hear me say, because of the nuances that are required in this job and the discretion, the fast pace, the sensitive nature of it, there's no technology that can give you the expertise of a Kimberly Patrick or Amber Robinson or a Mishir Bailey or any of the attorneys that are sitting here. And so building our attorneys, training our attorneys, attorneys that require less oversight, that can be more efficient, that cannot just write a letter but understand the discretion that is needed to perform this job has been my focus. Fantastic.

Thank you so much. Thank you. Alright.

Thank you. Next, we have questions from council president Marci Collier Overstreet.

Good morning, and thank you for your presentation. So not so much of a question. Thank you, colleagues, for your thoughtful questions. I want to thank you for presenting to us today and also for giving your seal of approval for what you've submitted to us. We don't all always hear that.

And it is always a question for us as we're looking through the the handouts and the book and and all of the things to make sure that we're making good decisions, prudent fiduciary decisions. You know, does this suit you? Is this exactly the way you'd like for it to look? And for you to have used the end of your presentation to put put your seal of approval, means a lot because that's often a question that we have. We ask each other.

We wanna make sure no one is submitting under duress. And I know that may sound a little strange, but we've been told several things over the years. This is, my ninth year at counsel, and I've heard it all. So thank you for that. Confidence is is important, and it's also assures us that you've watched every line, and I appreciate that. So thank you.

Thank you so much, council president.

So thank you.

Thank you. And I did have a question. You know, obviously, across the core functions that you all have, you take on a lot as a department. And and one of the things even with this council, I know we threw a lot at you last minute, that you're dealing with. As we talk about the outside counsel piece. And I know anyone has ever hired an attorney on their own knows that the cost can escalate pretty quickly even with a text message or a call, for those matters. And so can you talk a little bit about any measures that you put in in place to really kinda just, you know, put controls around escalating costs of of using outside counsel?

Yes. Absolutely. The great thing for you all in the city is I'm a twenty four plus year litigator, which means I pay close attention to those things. That is the purpose of those early budgets. Because if I can have an outside firm commit to me how the intend to expend the public resources on litigation, I can talk to them very early. And I will talk to them and say, let's talk about what this strategy really means. Right? Because they are partnering with the city, but we know the city best. And so in making sure that they're giving us budgets, evaluating cases, I'm not saying that anybody council does this. Thomas Worthy will tell you as well, but we are watching for attorneys.

And what we're also doing is making sure that we don't have attorneys outside counsel that are churning the city's budget, that it doesn't feel like a big bank to them. And so what we're also doing is internally, I'm evaluating every outside counsel at the end of every litigation. George Prothorough and I talk about that. I'm looking at how efficient they were. I'm looking at outcomes. I'm looking at how they manage the litigation. We are right sizing to the extent that we can counsel fees. We've been able outside counsel fees, so we've been able to decrease some of those immediately. Councils have agreed to those. We appreciate that understanding where the city is, where the city's budget is, and so they've been agreeable to that.

And so we've asked the question. I don't know that that question has been asked of them, so we're we're doing that as well. We're also looking at increasing and expanding our outside counsel bench. There are lots of attorneys in Atlanta that are willing to work at very reasonable rates that do excellent work and that are experts in their field. So expanding that bit so that we have more opportunities. So counsel understands that excellence must be delivered, but at the most efficient cost. So there, it is really keeping our hand on management of outside counsel to make sure that we are receiving a benefit and not just an expense to the city.

Okay. Well, I will say this this department has seen a to do a good job of keeping that line item flat because in theory, it is a variable cost that could change at any moment. But, if you if you look at some of the recent history, you've all done a great job, and, you know, we're appreciative of of the numbers that we see right now. If there's no other questions, comments from colleagues, I think we are good for this presentation. Appreciate the overview of the proposed budget, and we'll quickly move on to our next presentation, which is department of enterprise asset management. Thank you all so much.

Thank you. Thank you.

Management, I'm gonna turn it over to commissioner Davis, so he can introduce your team and get started with the presentation.

Good morning,

committee chair and other members of the committee. My name is Chris Davis, the commissioner for the Department of Enterprise Asset Management. And today, have with me, to my right, I will let, my directors introduce themselves.

Good morning. I'm Maurice Jackson, director of technical services.

I'm Sheryl Glenn Snooks, director of real estate.

Good morning. I'm Tiffany Byrdan, chief administrative officer. Good morning. Percyta Watkins, assistant director of administration.

Good morning. Billy Russell, director of operation.

I wanna say thank you guys for allowing us to be able to present to you guys today, our budget and wanted to go through. And, after we present, if there's any question that you guys have, we'd be more than to to provide them. The first line you're gonna see is the organizational chart. Nothing has changed from this except for you see a new column there for what we call MEP, which is mechanical engineering plumbing, which is a division that is created as new, but it actually came from within the team that we already have. And so as part of our technical service team, what we realized is that we had a lot of activity that was going on, but we needed to have a specific focus as it relates to the particular items that they was providing.

So along with my architectural design team, we actually have a number of of engineers that actually plays a major role in our operation and things that we do. And so by having that specific breakout with that, we can get a little bit more direct what take place. And between the two teams, we actually do some in house design work that we do where we do not go outside and solicit work from outside design team. And so we do internal design work, and we have the individuals that can actually create that. So a lot of our restocking and renovation projects, we'll do some of those in house, depending upon what the workload is.

We also utilize the same team to be able to go out on our capital improvement programs where we're utilizing and dealing with the Movement Atlanta Forward project. And so, with these two teams now, I can take my mechanical team, my MEP team, actually go out and do specific inspections upon the the mechanical packages and what takes place out in the field. That provides a level of expertise services that we, was trying to combine within one group, and that was very, very difficult for them to do. So that had actually added some components to our level of what we call quality control, quality assurance of one of our projects and making sure that we are actually getting the things that's designed and holding the contractors accountable. We have you also see that right now we as part of some of the vacancies that we have, we did have a retirement early this year for our BMO position, which we're actually interviewing for now.

We did phase one and so the next interview section is next week, and we should be able to fill that position. We also fill the position related to our document control data analyst person and also their position. So we're constantly going through and interviewing to backfill those positions where we lost some of the components early on this year. Next slide. Just wanna talk about a few things as it relates to some of the things that we've done this year.

City built for the future. With some of the programs that we do outside of Newfoundland, for we've installed 20 additional EV charging stations in the government center parking deck. This is along with the charging stations that we actually do in all of our new projects. So, the fire stations actually have EV chargers, and so we've gone a step further this year where we actually started implementing the chargers themselves. We used to just do a make ready and just have the infrastructure in place.

This year, we actually started doing and installing the charges as well. So we do that at all of our new facilities that we got going on. In addition to that, we actually implement, solar panels that we include as part of the program. So all of this is in alignment with the city's goal in trying to go green by 2035. And so we continue to do those things as it relates to that.

Some of the projects that we've been doing and that we completed this year, we've done phase one of our lactations facilities inside of City Hall. Because of some of the new laws that's been changed, we wanted to be ahead of the program. And so we started doing that. We completed the first one this year, and so we're gonna be adopting and completing the rest of those throughout the remainder of this year and and moving forward into the into the next year. We completed the completion of construction renovation for the DOP area, And so we was able to go down there and redirect the space a little bit, add capacity to their operation, and also create a more updated bedroom that they're using right now.

They call it the Innovation Lab if they use a lot of different things in that space. The we've been working on the municipal court project where we were converting them to the grid. We worked with Georgia PowerNet for the last five years, I would say, but we actually, there's a meeting that's going on right now to meet with the judges to go over the final stages, which is to turn over operation. That's gonna shut the municipal courts down for a period of over the weekend. And so we wanted to make sure we brought everybody to the table to where we can make sure we got all of the dots dotted and all of the the t's crossed so that there's no component left there.

So you're have the judges there. You're gonna have Ames there. You're gonna have Georgia Power there. You're gonna have all of the entities that's gotta make sure that this piece take place right. The importance of this project is that it takes the municipal court off of the overhead fees and also transform it and puts it on the grid, which allows them much better operation and less time at depth of interruptions where they lose power.

So this is something that's been going going, and we're really happy to say that we are actually able now to be able to close the loop on this project. The completion of the city hall exterior lighting systems, You all may have noticed some of that, but now we the new system that we put in, we actually have about 1,000,000 different hues of colors that we can actually use on the exterior of the building to be able to represent a lot of different things and requests that we get from time to time where the city can actually participate and show, its support of different activities that are taking place through the lighting system that you see is kinda common throughout, downtown city of Atlanta. Implementation of phase six of our EBI, which is our integrated building integrated system, is a BMS for us, which is a building management system. This allows us to be able to actually see our facility, see the infrastructure as it relates to our our mechanical system. It allows us to be able to control these from one location.

If we get a call, we get something that's going on, and versus now sending a person out to do an initial evaluation, The directive ops can actually pull up on his phone. He can see what's going on in the facility. Sometime he can reset it from their location and act and so the importance of that is that it allows us to have oversight upon all of our facilities in one one location. It also helps us to reduce when I say reduce, actually, to maximize manpower because before I was sending individuals out to these spaces. Now I can actually see these spaces from one location.

And when I do deploy a staff member to go out and do some work on the system, they pretty much kinda have an idea of where they're headed and what they're doing on their way out there. So it's a time saver. It's also, like I said, again, ability to be able to oversee what's going on. Last this this present year, we had the winter weatherization issue. When the temperatures drop, also, with one switch of a button, we can go in, and we can switch our facilities into what we call occupied mode.

We keep our facilities running full time when the temperatures drop. This diminished the chance of us having freezes in the building like we did before. So that gives us, again, that level of control from that perspective. Addition to that, we actually, early this year, we had groundbreaking ceremonies at both Police Zone 4 and then Fire Station 25. And so that happened early this year.

We're in construction in those two projects, and so we're very excited about what that's gonna look like. The other thing that we are scheduling and anticipating that we're gonna have within the next few months, and that is gonna be ribbon cuttings for Fire Station 30 and for Fire Station 26. And so those two are tracking pretty good and, then go from there. So the next slide just actually give you some photo shots of the groundbreaking for both Zone 4 And 425. The speaker just kinda put that in and kinda get an idea of what that's gonna be looking like.

So moving on as we as it relates to one safe city, you know, we we actually implemented the elevator modernization project, which is actually going to replace several elevation elevators in four different facilities, city hall, municipal courts, the public safety Headquarters. And then the ace of the jail. Right? The c s c. Yeah.

Yes. And and so because these elevators, you know, we've had some issues over the years, maintenance costs, etcetera. But the the modernization, we're actually gonna be replacing the entire system in here, and this way allows us to actually bring the elevators up to coal. The elevators that's in there now, they meet coal, but they meet coal from the date that they were installed. So now we're gonna be installing the systems.

It's gonna be much more reliable, and have the present day coal systems. So that's gonna be taking place right now. The engineers are out at several locations, and they're actually doing the engineering work that they need to do to be able to design because all of these are gonna be designed based upon the actual install. So they have to go out and do the preliminary engineering, which is what they're doing today. So we completed the design.

We're actually permitting for the EMS 41, which is out in the it's it's probably out there off of Sydney Marcus and Piedmont property right now that sits on a modern lot that we we've been negotiating with Marty for the purchase of this property so that we could put the fire station there. And so and we're getting very close to being able to ink that deal, and so we're excited that this is already in permitting. We've already got pricing on it. And so once we ink the deal with Marty, we'll be able to start groundbreaking for that project as well. The Fire Station 31, that one's completed and designed.

We are in permitting on that. Once we kinda get the permitting completed, then we'll reprice that project, and we're looking to be able to do a groundbreaking on that as well. Also, we just got to come into this group for 911 Center for the construction on that project. That one is also in permitting, waiting for we're very close to getting that approved in DeKalb County. The contractors are on board, the design team.

We actually started some preliminary administrative services so we can start taking advantages of the long lead items that we need to have installed in that project. It's actually tracking also to be able to have a groundbreaking this year. So city of opportunity for all. One of the things that we've been doing is just kinda supporting other departments in here, ATODOT projects, working with them on about 215 pending parser accusations with my real estate team. We work with them religiously.

We also do some training with them so that everybody understands the dynamics of what it takes to make those things happen. Also, in the real estate division, we've generated approximately $3,000,000 a day on revenue. This is based upon leases, easement right of ways, and things on that line. And so we continue to manage those pieces and keep those contracts up to date to make sure that we're capturing the benefits of that. We talk about the effective and ethical government.

This is just a way that we wanted to increase our management controls of over our contracts that we have. When we sit down and and write a contract and go through this process, we wanna make sure that we're very deliberate and very definitive based upon the services and things that we're required to do. This allows us to to be in alignment with the contractor to be able to make those things happen. One of the things that's critical for us to be able to do this, we just heard from the previous, presentation from law, is that, we we want to do all of this on the front end. And so if we talk about being able to go through and put all these projects together, we talk about our highlights.

The highlights for us is, as the mayor talks about, to just being a group project. Every project that we do and the success that we have is based upon pretty much all of the departments within the the city of Atlanta. So we deal with law. We deal with DOP. We deal with, DPR. We deal with planning. We deal with public works. We deal with watershed. And then, at the end of the day, then we come and deal with you guys. And and and I just wanna say thank you at this point to everyone because the success that we have is also based upon the support that you guys provide to us as it relates to when we come to you guys and we bring our projects set forward.

You ask the right questions. You're making sure that we are covering the bases upon here, but your support has always been very critical in the success that we have. So I just wanna say thank you, and thank you to the team. Next slide. So city bill for future.

It's important thing. I mean, we just wanna be having an ongoing thing as it relates to the EV chargers, the solar panels, continue working with sustainability office and be able to do those things that that kinda help the city move in that direction. What we've been doing to also make sure that we're in alignment with the ethical and effective city is updating and creating, in some cases, the SOPs to make sure that we're in alignment and that we're doing the things that we need to do. Because the more that we can do on those pieces at that level, it actually keeps the city functioning a lot more level without going beyond those pieces. The next thing that I'm excited about is that now we're getting ready to implement the next phase of our Maximo system.

Maximo is a what we used it for right now is our tracking tool to be able to track all of the calls that we get, be able to schedule PMs that we need to have. This efficiency allows us to be a lot more proactive on the front end, minimizing the the things that we have on the back end. So it does help us to reduce downtime and things on that line. And and so it it allows us to be able to schedule things in advance to be able to think to cover the stuff that we need to have. When we in the process of doing this, Billy and his team is able to schedule PMs on a regular basis, and then there's some things that actually require a little bit more downtime.

And that's when we, have been utilizing the end of the year where we would come in to to the city hall and shut the facility down and, because there's some cases where we gotta break down equipment and things like that to be able to make sure that we doesn't have the downtime throughout the year. That has shown, to prove to be very successful. We do have less downtime, so things on that line. Also, what that goes along with that piece of it is, it helps Bill and his team to have an early focus upon what take place. Earlier this year, we had a period where the, in Committee Room 1, the, the fan card, the system that was actually cooling that space, the bearings started going bad.

In the past, the bearings would go bad and the system would drop down, and then we actually would be out of, we couldn't use the Committee Room for a couple of weeks while we got the parts replacement. But what Bill and his team has been able to do is that when we get these type of notices, the awareness that takes place. And so when we realized what was taking place with the burying going bad, Bill and his team was able to go out and actually research the system, buy the parts that we needed, schedule a shutdown when nobody was in the space, get the system back up and running, and actually continue to operate, and you guys never know what was going on. And so there's there's least amount of impact based upon being able to have these pieces in place. And this is what Maximo allows us to be able to do is to track those things in the right way.

The, and so, as we talked about and I've mentioned before that we anticipate having groundbreakings this year for nine one one, EMS forty one, as well as fire station thirty one. Once we do that, that will complete all of our major building construction for the Movement Atlanta Forward project. Very excited about the success of that piece. And so as we move forward and anticipate, there would be a next capital project to where if we add some more fire stations and some other things. This is to show and allow everybody to let them know that we can actually make these things happen, and our team has been very excited about that.

As I mentioned before, when we had, a few retirements and some people to leave, the design team and the people sitting at this table, I actually was able to step up, including myself to go out now. I make site visits. I go out on new project job sites to make sure things are going. So the team has actually been able to kinda fill the gap to make sure that everything is working the way that it's designed to work. Next sheet. So position count by fund. As you can see here, we got 82 positions filled. Those numbers kinda fluctuate right now. It's probably a little bit more than that. We were showing 22 vacancies.

Out of those 22, 12 of those have actually been been abolished. So we actually actually just have 10 vacancies. And like I say, some of those are actually in the process of being interviewed for and getting filled. So so there, we we we're looking good there. We don't have any major issues at that point.

So finally, on our proposed budget from general fund, as you can see, our numbers continue to drop, but it's dropping based upon some strategic things that we're doing. And so this is not having any impact upon our operational service. It's really just based upon some of the things that I mentioned before as it relates to us being able to respond and do the things in our management approach and how we go about doing stuff. As we talk about within the team, as I share with with finance and other people, I don't know how to have fix anything. So we come in here and we do this project.

We fix things right. We try to do that the first time. So we're not throwing bad money out the window. And so by doing this, it does help us to be able to get much more better extended life out of our equipment when they would deal with these things and address the stuff in the right way. In addition to that, we've been able to combine some positions into, taking two position, combining them into one because of the service levels that what they're able to do.

And so we are seeing and as a result of that, we can see some of the deficiencies. This is also based upon us taking advantage of being able to use some of the Move the Land of Forward funding to be able to hire staff to do some things. And so we're taking advantage of that, which is starting to help show what the reduction look like. And so based upon the things that we have here, we feel very confident and very good in the spot to where we are. The things that we see here, this is not necessarily a surprise to us. This is just based upon some of the direction and the focus that we've been having. So with that, that kinda sec ends my presentation. So if you guys have any questions, we'd more than happy to address them.

Alright. Thank you, commissioner Davis, for that, overview of your proposed budget. We're gonna start with questions from council members and start with council member Doja.

Thank you, mister chair. Thank you, commissioner Davis. Good to see you as always.

Good luck.

I have not served on the committee of Purview in several years, so apologies if some of these questions come from a place of ignorance, but I wanna make sure I have all the information. One of the just sort of org chart related questions that I had was, our office gets reached out to pretty regularly to figure out ways in which either nonprofit organizations or other jurisdictions or government organizations can partner with the city of Atlanta to do events or to even, lease city owned properties for for their, operational needs. And I never really know who to forward those folks to. So as an example, with the property that we own, I forgot the address was off of Ted Turner. I got a chance to tour with mayor Mitch Landry a couple years ago.

All the solar panels on a rooftop there. There was a new jazz bar restaurant or something coming in. They want to lease city property too. And I was like, well, I don't know who the best pro point of contact is for that connection, but similarly, I've had folks reach out. Welcome House, for instance, was interested in partnering with the city to. They wanted to expand their footprint, own city, own property, parking lot, and then and as part of that development, build new parking that city will have access to, but what needed to have an agreement to make that happen. I know your inbox is is flooded, so I don't wanna go to you directly, but who should I be connecting these folks with whenever there's an opportunity like that?

So I was going to say just that I made me because, you

know, I don't have a

problem with getting with getting copies of going over, but you're right. My my my box does get full. So but that would be my director of real estate with you, Cheryl.

I will. And I think we've been in contact as well about Dunbar Neighborhood Center. The VA. We did an event last year at Dunbar Neighborhood Center, and they're looking at doing another event. I think we're going with a different location this time around, but as those opportunities come up, we wanna make sure we can be as communicative as possible.

Speaking of Dunbar Neighborhood Center, I know with Atlanta Public Schools, with their school repurposing plan, Dunbar Elementary School is being repurposed and they're still figuring out what the utilization of that. I've already socialized this with chief of staff English and and others within the administration, but will love to at some point to have a comprehensive conversation with city staff and APS staff about that larger complex. We're recognizing Dunbar Neighborhood Center and Dunbar Elementary School. We share, that space for the most part, and I think having a more intentional sort of community center opportunity as we think about future t splash and infrastructure bond and future construction projects to make sure that those interests are aligned, recognizing that it won't serve as a k to five elementary school anymore. But just that's a comment, but I wanna have that conversation with Dean so I know kind of what conversations I'm socializing with administration.

I do have a question about, with some of the I don't know if this is considered a capital project, but, you know, there's a few young dads that are part of this body. And thankfully, both my kids are potty trained now, but as a young dad city council member, it's sometimes disappointing when I go into a a public bathroom to try to change my youngest and there's no changing table. And I'm curious, have y'all done an evaluation of, city facilities that are accessible to the public and and the sort of amenities are available in those facilities? So we think about the, Atlanta for all sort of initiative, making sure that, both in men's rooms, women's rooms, and otherwise, that we can, make it easier for families to access city facilities.

Yeah, to answer your question, yet we have an and so that's one of the reasons that I mentioned about us being able to go in and start doing some of the upgrades to the existing facilities within City Hall. And part of that reason is to go in there and so that we can actually add those. So we're looking at what that looked like and and so the discussion that has taken place as relates to the public aspect of it. Where we have what we call gender neutral family restrooms, we put those in there because it allows both sides to be able to do that. With the lactation room.

Of course, they relieve some of the pressure because the women can go into those facilities and and do that as well. But it does allow that opportunity because based upon just the current space that we have within the city facilities. So that's why we can actually put those into the the general neutral, which we actually have on on multiple floors throughout the city.

And and and and I've seen those, and I think those have been amazing. My my thinking was with the the men's rooms that typically, historically, there haven't been changing facilities and also retrofitting those to also include those as part of men's rooms as well as as Yeah. And and if y'all have a timeline on when that retrofit work is expected to be completed, will. Of that?

So we we actually we're gonna be starting on the demands and the gender neutral restrooms in two weeks. Okay. And so we're gonna and so we'll do the ones on the right now on the 1st Floor, that's where we started at. And then we'll continue as relates to that as we move forward.

Okay, thank you. My next question is with regards to city owned properties that are not public right away, not parks when it comes to maintenance of those properties. So if if there's a vacant lot that city of Atlanta owns, it's not in the parks inventory. Who maintains, like, the overgrowth and all those? Is that a deemed function or is that something that is coordinated with public works?

So it's it's it's a combination, but having conversation with the team, we we're going to initiate the the ownership of them. And so those are some of the things we're actually going to be looking and and kinda cooperate, but also working with DPW in those areas and then to kinda figure out. And and so that's but that is one of the focal points that we do want to kinda have a little bit better oversight so that, to your point, which not one of those who's responsible or not, but to be able to establish what they look like. So we we started talking about that. We actually going to be initiating the the ownership of that piece and then to see where that goes.

Okay, so I and off say as a sidebar, I'll follow-up. Do you have a couple of parcels that, like I said, are owned by the city of Atlanta? One has been fenced off, which I think has made it challenging for the maintenance of that lot to take place in the way at the with the intervals that we needed. So it is very overgrown. And then similarly, as part of the city's acquisition work related to 405 Cooper with the the new rapid housing project up there, We've seen some of our homeless encampments start to repopulate in that area.

And while we're doing ongoing work with Partners for Home and and in town carriers to get those folks out of those encampments and into housing, there still needs to be we still need to secure those those properties that the city has control over. So Correct. Whether whether it's a wrecking fences or whether it's cleaning up the detritus and the debris that's over there, but we'll love to coordinate with you and your team to make sure we have a plan to make sure that happens. No problem. And I'll share I'll share with those after after the meeting.

My last question is just out of curiosity. When we sell or lease city owned assets, where do those funds go, those revenues? Is go into an enterprise fund? Does it go to a trust fund? Does it go back into the general fund? But where where do those funds sit when we sell or lease city properties? Whether it's parking revenue, whether it's when people reserve the atrium.

It's it it is based on whether, it is a neighborhood center. Neighborhood centers, 50% goes into the general fund and 50% goes into a trust fund. Some of the others, and I will pass it on to proceed there, Alexander, they may go into the general fund.

That is correct.

And is that true for if you sell us a city property as well, it goes back to the general fund.

It does.

Okay, thank you. That's it. I mean, I'd like to sell fall back up. Like I said, you know, haven't heard on FEC in awhile, so I'll make sure I ask questions more regularly so I don't have to take up time to budget hearings. Mr. Chair, I yield and Council President. Oh, she I was gonna, you know, tease her about committees I serve on, but we'll cross that bridge later this year. So talk to y'all later. Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Thank you. Councilmember Hillis.

Thank you, mister chair. Thank you, commissioner, for the presentation and your team. Talked about some of the new up and coming fire stations. When we Seventy two weeks. Cut the ribbon on Fire Station 22, I don't remember, over a year ago at least, there were some outstanding items, and at least I have not heard that those have been handled. The slide, the need for some secure fencing around their outside, kitchen area. Where is that?

So we where we so where do we at with the with the design that we finalized that?

Well, we finalized the design on the the slide, and we're we're we're now evaluating costing on that, but everything else has been, completed.

And where does that money come from? Is that money budgeted in this? Yeah. We

have budgeted for that. So we're still coming to you because we as I mentioned before, we were trying to get the current contractor, get them done, and then we just wanna come back and do that. So so the funding is there. It's just a matter we do have to come back once we get a bit select the contractor to do the work. K.

On the maintenance of well,

not

not just fire stations, but also the city facilities, I'll concentrate on fire stations. Believe that is now under deemed responsibility, and you all contract that out. Is that correct?

For for the the maintenance owner. So it depends on the open. Now we

do the the landscape maintenance.

Oh, so the landscape piece upon it. Yeah. So it's kinda the same thing with with fire and APD. So in having a conversation, then sometime APD will want would take on their responsibility, and sometime they'll need some support. So, that's why I say we really order to kinda have some consistency, we're probably gonna look at really trying to pull that back and just kinda take lead upon it so we can make sure we really wanna have the coverage that we need in the house.

But that is team's responsibility now? Yeah. The landscaping maintenance contract.

Yeah. I'm gonna take it. That that's what I'm saying. I because and and the reason I say I'm gonna take it, like I said, again, because it's just the inconsistencies of of what's what.

Yeah. And I bring that up because, at least historically, I mean, I'll I'll use Station 28, for example. Station 28 was built thirteen years ago opened thirteen years ago. The grass gets cut. That's about it. That's all I did to my house. I'd probably be divorced. You know, you have to upkeep the maintenance or upkeep the rest of the landscaping. You have to trim. You have to plant flowers.

You have to make things look presentable and look like they belong in the city of Atlanta. So I hope that's something that this budget can account for and that you deem and whoever that contractor is, can start to spruce up these fire stations that, you know, weren't built that long ago, but look pretty rough, but not just the landscaping maintenance, but, you know, getting them pressure washed, just keeping things like they should be.

Right.

Why were there so many delays in the Zone 1 Precinct? In Zone 1 Precinct? So

it's it was you know, we we go back to one of the things we talked about with the accountability of with the contractor, and the contractor came in, did some things to work was not acceptable. So we had him to come back and continue to work on and do some things there. So what happens is is is that when we when we're having that type of conversation with them and getting them to come back and and redo things, If we find out that there was something that that we talked about and they kinda covered it up, and and so what happened when you and when that happens, just like what we are experiencing now with Zone one, some of the things that they didn't do properly, it comes back up. And so when we identify those things, and in some cases, the contractor actually had to go back and and do some of work that they did. So it's it's and we did we had a gap in there at one point with, with personnel and the PMs that we had up on there.

And so when that happened, we did had to transition to a different PM. And so that's why you're starting to see a little bit more action upon there, that was one of the reason what caused that. K.

I believe in the past few years, there's been a push to go back to having more services done in house, especially when it comes to maintenance, electrical, plumbing, HVAC, perhaps gas. Where are we with that now, and what does this budget do, to enhance that?

So we we we continue to to to make those, so part of that is is also having the the the tools and equipment, that we can have, but then it's a place we've been able to have storage and be able to to house those type of equipment. Excuse me. And so, and and right now, we don't have the the storage facility that we that we have. So we are so those things that we actually can do, we continue to do in house And where we need that that outside support, we'll continue to utilize that. But we are still, just like I mentioned before, with the HPC stuff and with things, equipment along that line, you're seeing we're doing more and more of those type of activities in house than what we used to do, but depend upon some time.

Unfortunately, we don't we'll see a pattern to where as we are going, we have no issues for a minute. And then all of a sudden, in one week, we may have four or five incidents that take place that just kinda poured down upon the staff. And so and things like that in order to get a quicker turnaround, we will bring in outside sources to kinda help. But where we're able to schedule those type of events and and maintenance pieces of it, we are starting to do more than in house. Where

is your team? We heard a lot about fire stations, and I've brought this up before in quarterlies and other considering other legislation. The city spends way too much money building fire stations. 16 plus million dollars when I can get my car and drive ten minutes and be to a municipality or a county that bills the same, basically the same, three bay fire station, bunk rooms, restrooms, etcetera, for half or even less than half of that cost. Where is your team with evaluating that in in hopes of saving our taxpayers money?

So, you know, as we talked before a lot of times, you know, not knowing what their what their scope of work and things on that line. I will say two things. One is that when we complete our first station, our first stations are moving ready. So a lot of those station, when we go back and and actually just pull the construction costs, our numbers are actually right in line with that. When I say construction ready, I mean so we have, we got the data stuff that goes with all those pieces up in here. One of the things I talk about as it relates to, for example, the EV charges. That's not that's not a requirement in Cobb County and in other places. That's a requirement for the city of Atlanta. So we have to install those pieces as we made to that. The solar system, the solar panels, and things like that.

Again, those are not requirements, and those things are added. We do the lead silver, which is a requirement that the city of Atlanta has these other counties and things like that. They don't have those type of requirements as it relates to that. So and the same thing with the with with the tree orders and things like that. So these are added costs that we have to deal with, and that's okay.

But the other half of that is is that, you know, a lot of our fire station right now, the average age is around 52, 53 years old. We're building stations that actually will last and and have less amount of maintenance as related to that, and I'll give you a prime example. We we fit out all of our fire stations with stainless steel kitchenware. What we've seen in the past is that when we have the wood and things on that line, it doesn't last. I mean, we go in there. We replace wood cabinets and stuff, and you can see some of the ones that's that's existing. We haven't done anything. Those things don't last. And so we had to come in and do multiple renovation things on that line. So the idea that what we do now with the, the CMU walls, you know, do, we don't do jet walling stations.

Those don't last. Jet wall, we don't put the floorings upon the station. So, you can go into a fire station that we have been building today five years from now. You go in there with a water hose and spray it down, and you you look like a new a new fire station. So we're building stations to actually last longer.

And so what you'll see because, yes, it's cheaper to use drywall in the fire stations, but that I can tell you right now doesn't last. When we did drywall in Zone 3, within six months, we had to go out there and we was patching holes and things on the line. These are operational and function buildings, so we tried to build them and design them accordingly. So when the firefighter come from comes back from fighting the fire with rocks and all this stuff and his boots and things on their line, they're not looking to try to make sure that they don't damage your facility. And it's not that this is an intentional act.

It's just that when I got rocks in my boot and I'm walking across the carpeted floor or finished floor, I'm gonna leave square marks where I'm right now, we polish the concrete floors. So we build these stations to, again, to handle the type of activity that take place in there. So when we started doing those things, and like I said, again, moving ready, these these equipped with all of the furniture. So they got the the bedrooms, the bunk rooms, and all that stuff is there. You got the kitchen table. You got the the day room. You got all of the things that they actually need. So when they move into a station, they drive down, they get a call. The WestJet system is set up. Everything that's required for them to be able to operate that station when they move into our station is ready.

I can certainly see that adding a few million dollars, but I'm I'm still not convinced that that, you more than doubles the price of a fire station. The one thing that you mentioned that does make my blood boil a little bit, which me and council member Overstreet tried to try to fix last term, then council member Overstreet. Now president Overstreet was that tree ordinance. Our own city departments, UWall, Watershed, ATL DOT, should not be shuffling money around between city departments because we are building new city facilities. So, yeah, you can just shake your head. So that is something that I will continue to push and work for because if you tell the state or Georgia Power that, I'm not gonna show you what they would give you. Yeah.

And and I would say I would say, you know, it's it's actually with the change. I mean, it's it's actually has gotten better, but those are just some of the things sometimes that that would add to the cost.

Yeah. Lastly, is I want to know how much Dean spent on the

state of

the art HVAC system and the council chain or the the council offices. Because I've been complaining as my colleagues for the past four days about 75 to 80 degree offices, and they have not come down. I got here today. It was 75. I went back just to double check to make sure I wasn't gonna be telling a story right before your presentation. That was why was about a minute or two late. 75 in my office. What how much was spent, and why can that system not do what it needs to do?

Okay. I will have to get the total number that was that was actually spent upon the work over there, but Billy and Billy can fill you in up on it. But I do know that we did we we lost control activities about a week or so ago because of some AIM issues up in there, which has allowed us to be able to not have the control that we normally would have. So, can you give us an update upon that?

Yep. So I actually went, myself yesterday, to look at it and try to resolve the problem. And the biggest issue that we have right now is the, connectivity to the control system. So, just before this meeting, I got notification that we were back, that we could act we can, access our servers and that we were back able to make control of it. So so when you guys get out of here, hopefully, we'll be we'll be back to where we

should be. We will certainly let you know. Thank you, commissioner and your team, and,

thank you, mister chair. Thank you. Next, we have questions from councilmember Amos.

Thank you. You know,

I'm taking the time to

look out into the audience, and I see a lot of familiar faces that as you telling us, thank you. I just want to tell you and your whole team thank you. I've been one of the ones complaining about the the heat in the air, and they have always been responsive. They do something, and then they come up to make sure it's done. Then it's funny because somebody else will come up and make sure it's done too.

But I understand what councilwoman colleague is saying that we should not have to have your guys and ladies running all over the building when it should be as the system you expected to get to hit a button. Only question I have, and councilmember Hill is hit on a little bit. Yesterday, chief, chief police talked about the renovations at Zone 1, and I asked whose budget it'll be in. I don't see it printed in your budget. And he said it'll be in your budget. So I'm just trying to get clarification on the renovations as on one.

So, yeah. So we we, again, we so when we get calls and things along that line for the facilities. We will go out and and address and see what's going on. And so we we we do cover those those day to day operational pieces that take place. So and if there is and then when there are cases like we had in Zone zone 1, actually, there was actually a project that we was doing over there, and so we was having some additional issues I explained earlier.

And so what we you know, and and we are seeing a little bit of that where we experiencing a shift in our approach to things as it relates to quality control and dealing with the contractors and accountability piece. And and so and in the process of doing that, we're going to have a little bit more when I say back and forth, not so much per se with dealing with the contract, but their expectation what it is that the services that they go out and walk away from. So, but as it relates to the maintenance stuff and things like that, when we get a call, we go out there and we service the equipment like we do City Hall anywhere else.

Did not ask the specific question. I left with the assumption, which I should not have. So I'm going to ask now. Should we expect a full renovation of Zone 1 or just maintenance of Zone 1? So the

renovation was on that's a different type of budget pieces, so that has to be financed a different way. And so the the budget that we sort of the renovation at the the one that we just did, that that actually came from a bond premium process. That was not a maintenance, you know, part of our general fund maintenance piece upon it. So it's two different funding pieces when we do that.

And then just looking into

the future Fire Station 16, it's time for a rehab. I know there's some historical things we have to do there, so I'm willing to start the historical conversation now. So when we finally get to f y, hopefully, '27, '28, we'll be able put some money in the budget to do it. So just let me know what we need to do.

So yeah. So we Maurice to reach out to you, him and his team, and talk with you and to see what those dynamics are. And then from there, like I said, again, we can start incorporating in those and and actually start pricing just depending upon what it is that you

Alright. Thank you. Are you there, mister chair?

Thank you. Councilman Worthy.

Thank you, mister chair. Thank you, commissioner. Thank you, team. It should surprise no one in this room that my predecessor, mister Shook, admonished me to keep my mouth shut and ask questions only about the budget. And I am going to this is more of a comment, but it's related to the budget.

The EMS 41 set station, on Piedmont, deeply, deeply important to me, deeply important to that community. Not only is it vital for the one safe city pillar, but it is also very, very important reinvestment in a in a neighborhood that desperately needs it. So anything that you need from my office or with my help, we stand ready because we're very, very excited, and I was really excited to see that on the slide. So it's just more of a comment than a question. Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Thank you. Councilman Collins.

Sorry. Thank you all so much for this presentation. For me, it was it's just extremely informative just to understand the depth of the dean team, but also just wanna thank you thank your team just for the responsiveness and making sure that, you know, my office and everyone on my, you know, just really being very supportive in supporting the community request that we seek receive. And as a Tamika and a few others, just wanna thank everybody for for that. The questions that I just have in terms of understanding, and some may defer to finance.

Excuse me. So on page four forty six of our budget book, you have your pro performance metrics listed. And I know your target in terms of lease revenue, in house design savings, dispositions. Just curious, is that all of the that is that all of the revenue that we're actually bringing in on the deem side, for lease revenue is 2,000,000 a year, dispositions is only 3,000,000 a year. Is that is that accurate?

Or and and if so, I I will so if so, if you give us more detail on what that looks like just because of the conversation in terms of this was, you know, disposing properties, selling, leasing. I mean, the city is, you know, one of the largest land owners in this, you know, in the, of course, in the city. So just curious in terms of that, those numbers seems pretty low.

The numbers, we can give

you a

detailed list of where the revenue is coming from. It comes from the apartments that we have at City Plaza as well as Live Nation Center Space, which leases the grounds that we own out there at the amphitheater. Mhmm. And so sometimes it fluctuates based on the activities that they have, events and everything. We do have a lump sum that comes from certain tenants that we have, and that comes at the end of the year. So we don't capture that until the end of the end of the fiscal year or end of the calendar year for them.

Thank you for that. So this revenue so the these revenue sources, the these funds go to the go back into the general fund as well? Or are you all a or is deemed able to repurpose them? Or is that excuse me. Is that capital flow that goes back to the actual department versus to general fund?

That is going back to the general fund.

Okay. And then the we're kinda getting some information, where could where where can we find the list of capital projects that we have that are either, you know, underway or in the hopper so we just have a better understanding of all of, you know, just kind of all of our real estate and what those pieces look like. Is that is that available? Yeah.

So there is a moving Atlanta forward dashboard that captures all of it. What those are all of the projects that are that are part of the move Atlanta forward project. So some of the renovation pieces that we do is part of the capital. And so we will provide. We can provide you with that list and what that look like.

So I'll move it. So just to be clear on the on the move Atlanta for website, the 25 capital projects as listed here will be our top are the same as 20 are the same as the capital projects that we can find on the website.

Yes, so the right. So yes, so the warrants that are that sort of ones that I've mentioned here are part of the moving landing forward. Okay, And so they all of those will be on the on the dashboard for moving landing forward. Great.

Thank you. And this is just a general question for finance. Just to be as we are moving to moving through the department presentations, madam deputy CFO, do so all of the revenue where can we find Mhmm. In the budget all of the rep you know, kind

of the line item of

the revenue captured in all of these spaces that are not tied to one of the, you know, our general fund or or the enterprise fund. Where can we find that number?

We do have a breakout in the front of the book Yep.

That will

categorize all the revenues that we have by the funds, and we can share that page and give you additional information if you need more, information. But I also wanted to share about the capital projects. Currently, the capital projects that we have are in the back of the book. So we do have the capital projects such as moving Atlanta four and all the different capital projects that we have there in the back section of the budget book indicated under capital project status summaries. And that will start on page five zero three.

Right. Right. So my question, I was looking

at that.

So it doesn't so that it doesn't tell us specifically what those projects are, and it's just help us be able to communicate that to the community at large. And so if you look on page five zero seven, it has, you know and now if if this is the right one, it has, you know, E 9, you know, E 9 e 911 renewal extension fund, 1.6. T splash capital project fund, 48,000,000. Westside Tad fund, 139,500,000. So it doesn't just give the specifics of it.

That just helps with the reason I was asking for, like, the more detailed list of what we can access it, and it sounds like we can do that on the website. It's just it just allows us to be able to communicate to the community at large, like, is where your money is act this is where the funds and the the and money is actually going. So that's why I was, that that that was the detail of my question on that end. So yeah. So we'll okay.

Yeah. We can do that. And I think that's pretty much all the questions, that I have. I do do just wanna uplift, like, is one of the if not the first budget, the first department presentation we have where 100% of the funds come from the general fund. It's not enough you know, as you all you're not tied to the airport revenue airport revenue or any other. So I do think, on our end, just kinda being mindful of that as we think about, like, some of those savings, but also understand and make sure they have what they need to feel supported knowing that 100 of their budget is from our general. So with that, mister chair, I yield. Thank you so much.

Alright. Thank you. Councilmember Martin.

Thank you so much, mister chair. My questions are very, very brief. I just want and I may have missed decided to tap out and take a call for a moment. Just wanna get an update on the Zone 4 rebuild as well as Johnny White's new senior facility. That that is all it is that is all. And I see my predecessor sitting over there. She may have asked it already, but I'm so sorry if I had if I missed it.

So you wanna know the status of Zone 4?

Yes.

Yeah. So, I mean, we we actually we're in construction now. I mean, we we been pouring for the last two weeks of foundation coming up with the structure and steel that's been ordered. They're working on, like I said, getting the site prepped and being able to to to get those things moving like they're supposed to. You'll start seeing more and more vertical pieces come into play. They what they're doing now is is getting the building pad ready. So with that piece going into place, then they'll come in and do their underground, support, which is your utility lines as well as your plumbing, sewer, electrical, and then those things will take place, and they'll come back, and then they'll pour the floor, and then you start seeing more of the vertical piece score.

Fantastic. Because I'll get them back to District 11 as soon as possible, and I'm out of out of four. Well, sorry to my colleague over there. The other thing is the the Johnny White facility. Is there an update on you? I don't know if you all are managing that, though.

Think No. So Johnny White, that's by DPR.

That's right. Okay. Well, they're coming later today, so I appreciate it. Thank you, mister.

Alright, thank you. And then lastly, I just wanted to see if we can unpack the FTE number, the big reduction 52 that we see on our budget books. You know, you had it kind of low in FY '24, then we went up to January and stayed there for a couple years. So just wanna wanna wanna know if you can unpack that a little bit, making sure that these impacts don't, you know, don't hurt us in terms of being able to maintain our facilities going forward.

So the so as relates to the to the salaries and things like that, like I said, getting a paying class that really made a real big difference in a lot of things what we was doing. And so we have I mean, we've lost some position. I mean, we've lost some staff members due to them getting a higher salary, But but that's typically gonna be in more of your skill set, so that's related around the, the HVAC techs. But but and and that's in the market that we have today, that's not unusual. You you see that those those salaries are not sustainable, but at the time, they are and they're attractive.

And so but where we are right now with with with with the new and paid class study and things on the line, that has really made a huge difference in what it is that we're doing. We continue to hire people. Mean, you know, they'll come. And and like I said, again, so so that's not has not been a problem. It's just that, you know, some people do see an opportunity and and, you know, they'll they'll take advantage of it.

Okay, so there's more level setting than anything else in. Exactly. Okay. Alright. And lastly, I'll just say that I was glad to hear that we will be having baby changing stations coming in soon. I actually sponsored legislation in '23 when I had my one year old who will be four in a couple of months. So unfortunately, I mean, couple of weeks, so I won't actually be able to, you know, utilize it, but I'm glad other city employees will.

Yeah. So what you know, that was one of those things that we we did talk about that, you know, a few years ago and what did that look like. And I think the original request that came through, and that was for every facility within the city and and that wasn't feasible. So so there's few questions, but but now based upon what it is that we're doing, the team has been doing some research to make sure we get the right type of system that fits into. And and like I said, again, in trying to put those into it, you know, we can fold on the table and do different things, but we just wanna do it the right way to make sure. Like I said, again, those are sustainable as it relates to it, but you're you're starting to see that now.

Alright. Alright. Council president.

Yeah. I'm I'm back to the the the the air conditioning system. Just right quick. So you all are saying that you're going to be able to control it. Are we gonna be able to control those ourselves in our office?

The the the the the short answer, yes. We we will will give you guys the the controls of that, and but they'll have parameters

upon that,

but we will give you all control.

And and and one of

the reason why, you know, that project came about is because, you know and we understand that, for example, you know, Hillis could want it at 68 and and Mary could want it at 82. And and so and so, you know, and the way that the system was before that, it was zoned. That's right. The intent here was to be able to give you all the individual controls so we can do that, but we had to make sure that the system actually is responding. And we did, like I said, again, lost the connectivity with Ames doing some different things. And so those are now coming back up on board. So you should see a a lot better access to that. But we will once we kinda get things stabilized, then we will get the controls upon that so you guys can actually monitor it yourselves.

Okay. That's that's exactly what I wanted to hear. Thank you.

Alright. Thank you. We appreciate, you know, you all going over this proposed budget, and I'm sure we'll continue to have conversations, going forward. So, everyone, we're gonna quickly transition over to our next presentation, which is the Department of Watershed Management. We do realize that we are a little overtime, so we will probably end up bumping some of the the afternoon sessions, back a little bit just to make sure that we give Watershed ample opportunity to be able to go over their budget.

Appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you.

Management, we'll welcome commissioner Eirley and allow you to introduce your team and get started.

Thank you, counsel. We, declared a drought ten days ago, and it has rained six times in every twenty four hour period since we declared a drought, which leads me to believe that we should have declared a drought sooner, and we wouldn't be in a drought. I'll let you think on that. So good afternoon, everybody, or good morning, soon to be afternoon. We're here to talk about our budget moving forward for the next fiscal year and also talk about a number of initiatives and directions that we are taking here in Watershed.

Our primary functions are listed below, and that's to provide safe drinking water, deliver, effective customer service, collect and treat wastewater, to, meet state and federal requirements, and maintain, repair, replace water infrastructure, and protect our urban waterways to reduce flooding. Before we leave this slide, I I just want to point out that for nearly three decades, the city has been under a federal consent decree for sanitary sewer overflows and combined sewer overflows. And so if you look at these primary functions that are listed on this page here, collect and treat wastewater. Collect wastewater is what we've spent the majority of our money on for the past several decades. So this is something to keep in mind as we move forward in the next couple of decades or where we need to invest in.

Wanna talk about Rocket. I talked about it briefly last week at CUC. This is a coming initiative within Watershed that is aimed at helping our culture within our work environment and also how we treat, interact with the public. But the most important thing is how we treat each other at work. And it's an expectation and value that I have to exhibit as the commissioner, all of us at this table, as well as our supervisors and our frontline employees.

And ROCCAT stands for respect, ownership, communications, integrity, and teamwork. We'll be rolling ROCCAT out this next year. There'll be training. There'll be events. There'll be awareness. You'll see it in our presentations. I wanted to permeate everything that we do that we treat each other with respect. We own the problems and issues that we deal with at work. We communicate clearly and concisely. We have integrity at everything that we we do, and we work as a team.

So rocket. You'll be hearing more about that, and I look forward to see the impacts on a watershed in the coming years. Our organizational chart, it, has changed since I got here. It's the same organizational chart we had last year. We only have one box now empty without a name.

We hope to rectify that in the next couple of weeks. So then we will finally have a complete executive management team to move forward in, achieving our mission. Nothing gets done without the people of Watershed. I just wanted to share a few of our folks here, that work behind the scenes. We're 247365.

Regardless of the weather, we're there, keeping the city safe with drinking water and collecting wastewater and protecting the city from flooding. Little bit of a overview, about Watershed. We are one of the, 100 largest utilities in The United States. However, if you look at utilities run by a city government, I would bet that we're in the top 10, if not the top five. I'll do a little more research on that, but I'm guessing we're certainly in the top 10.

We do have three water treatment plants. We do share 50% of the Tom Lowe treatment plant, and we're responsible for 50% of the capital costs there. Also, we have 16 major offices within Watershed. I pointed that out on the organizational chart. We have 1,582 full time employees.

We'll get into more detail on that with our headcount in the next slide. Going down to the bottom, some some important numbers to look at here. We do have a very large budget in 819,000,000. We'll go into more detail about where does that money go. Currently, that $1,400,000,000 tied up in capital.

Over 700, over half of that is tied up with a consent decree. So half of our capital budget is tied up with the wastewater consent decree. We can manage over $5,000,000,000 worth of assets, and we have a double a bond rating, which was just recently upgraded. So it's said that Watershed we've heard, you know, Watershed has lots of money, and they're flushed short cash. We do have lots of money.

There is lots of cash. We have a lot of customers. We bill a lot of people. There's it takes a lot to keep this enterprise fund going. However, that money goes a lot of places very quickly, and and you realize there isn't much money left.

So the bulk of our money, almost 20% or over 20% goes to personnel services and then debt services. We're paying off what we have borrowed to build. Our contracted services also are a big portion of our budget, so there's always a balance between personnel services and contract services. There are some projects both from a scope perspective as well as the type of equipment that's used or the training that's needed that is best served by the private sector, and so we contract for some

of those types of services.

One thing I do wanna point out is, we we do support the city, in a number of other departments for services that we use or share. And we set aside right now $1,000,000 for Care and Conserve. And our balance we currently have in Care and Conserve, I believe, is that 6,000,000?

That's correct.

6,000,000. So we are looking for ways not only to expand Care and Conserve in the in the future, but certainly do a better job of how do we distribute that money and get it to those who need it for assistance. Capital investment needs. Again, the consent decree, we have remaining with the remaining projects of sewer group five and six. We have 1,700,000,000 that is needed to complete those projects.

Many you may know or certainly those on the CUC know that, we've been in talks with the EPA, about reducing the scope of those projects that we believe from a performance standpoint that we have reached substantial completion of the consent decree in the past twenty five years. We have reduced sanitary sewer overflow volumes and combined sewer overflow volumes by 99%. And we believe the city has achieved everything we set out to do, several decades ago under mayor Shirley Franklin. And if we're able to just finish the projects with that, we're presently working on that we will be able to reallocate approximately $700,000,000 towards other capital needs. Also, we, have completed the Army Corps study, and, we are the process of hand hiring a program manager that will help us implement the pipe replacement and long term water resilience strategy.

We've already identified a $147,000,000 worth of what we call no regrets projects that will help improve our water infrastructure and reduce the number of breaks and service interruptions. Smart meters, previously, we called AMI, but we're not calling it that anymore.

We're out

smart meters. We are in the final phases of the pilot. We'll share a little bit more about that later in the presentation. That'll have a dramatic effect on our ability to not only collect our revenues. However, it will give the customer a lot more interaction with the utility, real time information.

They'll be we'll be able to detect leaks quickly, both in the system and at their property. And we'll talk more about how we're going to interface our customers in the future later in the presentation. One thing that I do wanna point out, is that, emergencies, we, it's listed there. We have that as $50,000,000. We don't know what that number is going to be.

When we have an emergency, we go and we fix it. And so depending on what happens this next year, that number could be less. It could be more. Again, I wanna point out to your left, the upper and the lower, what we're spending on drinking water versus what we're spending on the consent decree, and we're looking to rebalance that infrastructure investment moving forward. Our plan of operation, of course, you know, we we are here to meet compliance, keep the public safe both within the city and the additional 600,000 plus people we serve outside the city.

We do serve 1,200,000 people. We are looking at our critical functions. What is it that we spend our time working on? What assets need to be replaced? How do we interact with those assets?

How do we improve the efficiency of those assets and our ability to automate and reduce the amount of staff time it takes to operate our facilities. In addition, our, service delivery SLAs, we are looking at those one at a time. For example, last week at CUC, we highlighted our customer contact center and talked about our hold times and drop rates. So our hold times for our calls average over sixteen minutes, and our drop rate is 40%. 40% of the people get tired of waiting and they drop off.

We know that's not acceptable, and we're gonna take active steps to remedy that. The customer contact center and how we interact with our customers is a combination of three things, process, technology, and people. We feel like we've optimized the process as far as we can take it. The technology piece, a lot of that is in place. We're working to improve some pieces of that that are taking more time than we would like.

And then the final is people, and we'll talk about people and a little bit later in the presentation of what we're doing there. Mentioned before, we are optimizing our debt portfolio and focus on collections. We do have a substantial number of dollars that are uncollected. We have worked to reduce our collection debt between 2010 and 2023. We did not perform shutoffs for nonpayment.

Since then, we started doing shutoffs in March 2023, and we performed over 6,000 shutoffs since. And we've collected an additional $6,000,000 of our uncollected debt, but we have, far to go. We worked very hard on, filling our open positions. We'll talk in more detail about that in a moment, tightening our interview cycle, And we're looking to recruit and retain the next generation workforce. An example of that is taking some positions in our office water treatment that have been unfilled for quite some time and repurpose those positions to entry level positions that we can hire somebody in off the street and train them to become a wastewater operator.

And then strategic align our capital investments. I already talked about that earlier about realigning our investment into our assets in a way that better aligns with the city's current needs and future needs. In addition, storm water utility, we've touched on that in CUC, and also, integrating, technology and AI where we can. We are already actively, talking to different companies about AI. Right now, some of our assets are at an age that their ability to integrate modern technology, it's just not there.

It's it's old they are old assets, old electronics, old communications, old gray infrastructure, mechanical infrastructure, electrical infrastructure. In order to implement new technologies with those infrastructures, they need to be replaced and modernized. Let's talk a little bit about our headcount. I'm gonna turn

it over to director Ransom.

Good afternoon. I'm Taneil Ransom, the HRBP director for Watershed. So on this slide, you'll see Watershed's 15 offices and the total number of positions assigned to each office. I like to note that all of the positions are fully funded. And as of April 2026, we have a total of fifteen eighty two authorized positions.

When we include extra help positions, our workforce increases to seventeen twenty one employees, bringing our fill rate to just over 83%. One of our key workforce objectives is to increase staffing levels and achieve achieve a fill rate of at least 90%. Reaching this benchmark is critical because it will strengthen operational continuity across all divisions. It will reduce overtime dependency and employee fatigue. It improve emergency and severe weather response capability, and it also lower the risk of service disruptions and regulatory exposure.

Currently, we have two eighty four vacancies. Approximately 52% of those vacancies are within operations, specifically the Office of Linear Infrastructure and the Office of Water Treatment and Reclamation. The remaining vacancies are distributed across the departments, others offices. Many of our positions are difficult to fill due to the highly specialized nature of the work. Of course, the water wastewater engineering and compliance roles, they often require state licensure or industry certifications or technical expertise.

In addition to that, we continue to compete with municipalities and utilities that offer higher market wages for similar talent. Despite these challenges, we are actively implementing strategies to strengthen recruitment and workforce development. In FY '26, we expanded our recruitment outreach efforts by participating in five career fairs and workforce development events. These included partnerships and engagements with the YMCA, Lincoln Tech, Showcase Atlanta at the Georgia World Congress Center, the Veterans Fair, as well as recruitment events hosted at the epicenter. These events have allowed us to connect directly with job seekers and strengthen our pipeline for both entry level and specialized positions.

Another strategy includes repurposing positions to address operational priorities. For example, we are moving 12 vacant positions to the office of customer care and billing services with plans to fill them out of class as customer resolution specialists. We're also expanding our trainee pipeline. The trainee role requires only a high school diploma or GED with no prior experience, making it one of the most accessible entry points into the department. So once hired, our trainees receive structured on the job training and classroom instruction to help them become certified operators.

This approach creates a built in career progression pathway for employees while helping us build a sustainable workforce for the future. To support these efforts, we have partnerships with professional training programs such as the Georgia Water and Wastewater Institute, Atlanta CDL Training Schools, and many others. Trainees are eligible for advancement to the next level after completing six months of experience, forty hours of foundational training, and successfully passing the state certification exam. Thus far, we have hired 93 employees and counting. And our employees are essential to delivering reliable service to residents of Atlanta every day.

We remain focused on creating a workforce that is skilled and supported and prepared to meet the future needs of the city.

Where's the quarter? Good

afternoon. My name is Jonathan Williams, and I'm the deputy commissioner of financial administration for the Department of Watershed Management. I see new faces here that weren't here last year. And because of that, I'm gonna give kind of a, just a high level view of how we are organized, so it makes some sense. As you're probably aware, the Department of Watershed is an enterprise fund.

As with all enterprise funds, the Office of Watershed Management is required to submit an annual budget that reflects a match between revenue and expenses. With any net expense with any net ex excess revenues collected at the end of fiscal year defined as equity roll forward. We use that to fund our capital programs. We our organization is broken down into two parts. Five zero five one, water and wastewater revenue funds derive revenue from water sewer services, plant operating charges, municipal option sales checks, and other operating revenues, and supports ongoing delivery, o and m, as well as financial debt obligations.

Five zero five two, water and wastewater renewal and extension fund derive revenue from interest earnings, tap and meter sales, a portion of the most, and equity transfer. This fund provides support for the department's capital improvement plan. Five zero five two also includes the office of linear infrastructure operations, office of engineering services, and a small piece of financial administration. For clarity purposes, my remarks reflect both accounts with detail included in the in the appendix and or separate cover as requested. Slide 11 reflects flat year over year budget growth or roughly 1% forecast reflect to reflective of our current forecast, run rates, and assessments of current market conditions.

So if you look at the chart, you'll see that we're almost dead on from last year, about $811,000,000 change on $800,000,000 total in budget. Slide 12 reflects water sewer municipal option sales tax revenues from fiscal year twenty twenty five forward and graphically depicts the flat performance of these funding sources. These two categories alone account for over 88% of Watershed funding sources and remain flat over the recent historical and budget forecast period. The remaining 12% of revenue forecasted is heavily dependent on market variability like interest rate income on cash, one time benefits obtained by our treasury organization that optimize our debt portfolio, and usage sensitive building buildings derived from other intergovernmental buildings for use of our infrastructure. As you'll see, everything on every chart is flat.

If we if we look at slide 13, shows the impact of inflation on expenses. From a broad category perspective, Watershed continues to see significant year over year cost escalation in all areas from salary and benefits, equipment pricing, debt service, and contractor expenses. While other water systems have implemented index based year over year pricing adjustments that have incorporated national economic performance, market indicators like the consumer price index at roughly two to 3% per year, Watershed has not adjusted our rate since 2010. In fact, in benchmarking against other metropolitan areas, the comparable year over year construction escalation rate is more like eight to 12%, and that is reflected by the consumer price index. Slide 14.

DWM complies with the requirement to submit, as I said, a balanced revenue when expense budget every year. However, the pressure of escalating cost cost against a flat revenue stream has negatively impacted the equity roll forward that would be used to fund our growing list of capital projects. Slide 14 reflects the erosion of net revenues that have resulted from declines in income while we incur escalating costs. Treasury has been able to execute some great opportunities to take advantage of debt portfolio actions that caused our net revenues to escalate in 2022, but these actions were largely nonrecurring and events don't alter the overall trajectory of the revenue erosion and ultimately our equity roll forward. This next slide gives a graphical depiction of the gap between

I'm

sorry. Okay. The gap between our our revenue, our expense growth, and ultimately our equity roll forward, and it's significant. Again, as I as I reflect on 02/2022, the office of treasury was able to do some bond refunding, which really gave us a huge benefit, and they continue to be great allies to work with in terms of how we manage our debt full portfolio. But if you look at the overall trend, our net revenues continue to cascade downward.

Our next page is a depiction of the equity roll forward. And as you'll see, just in this year alone, we're going from 164,000,000 down to an expectation of less than a 100,000,000. That $50,000,000 comes out of our capital capacity to execute, and it's of which is why we're going to Wall Street to issue bonds and focus on collections and all the other levers that are available to us to generate cash. Areas of particular note, one is collections, not only for our outside customers, but from our partners in other jurisdictions. It's taking too long for them to pay.

And even though there's been some turnover in both departments, we need to focus on that. In in particular, we've got one dozen that owes us $24,700,000 that we're seeking to get paid as soon as possible. In addition to that, we've added some outside firms to our collections organization, and we'll continue to do so. We've added 15 positions and are working with some external firms that charge us in a way that doesn't detract from our ultimate receivables. Many many companies will want a percentage of your near term receivables as the cost of doing business with them.

We're we're fortunate to have found some people that are doing a great job. We've upgraded our standard operating procedures and are we're starting to see a pickup in our collections, internal as well as intergovernmental. While a portion of the cost escalations have been absorbed by increases in revenues for most, it will not be enough to fund the escalating requirements of maintenance costs associated with growing capital needs. As it relates to our care and conserve program, as the commissioner said, OFA is providing customer outreach that will allow customers and financial assistance on outstanding balances, education that supports minimizing minimizing usage, leak detection, and support for providing documentation that will help our consistent constituents in reaping the benefits of the program. Many people have struggled to fill out the paperwork or have issues understanding what's required in order to receive that.

As he mentioned, we do have $6,000,000 in that fund and are actually actively seeking recipients, to help folks with the aged receivable. With us not turning off people's water service for thirteen years, you can imagine that the amount is huge and even more difficult to collect when the person that's on the account may not live there anymore. There are lots of issues. So we're taking an active role in standing at and increasing that cap capacity. In summary, DWM has taken a judicious approach to prioritizing our operations and maintenance capital planning that reflects available funding and strategic planning as we seek to address our most impacted expense and capital projects.

At the same time, we're currently addressing the potential impacts to our rate and fee structure as well as cost containment initiatives that will enhance our capital capacity. That concludes my thoughts.

Despite a number of challenges we have on the financial side, the utility continues to perform and not only serve the public but receive recognition. Deputy commissioner, would you like to share some of those?

Yes. Good afternoon. Quentin Fletcher, deputy commissioner for the Office of Water Treatment and Reclamation. And as the commissioner, mentioned, despite our many challenges, the department wanted to highlight a few awards that we received this year. The Association of Metropolitan Water Associations Agency was formed in 1981.

We are founding members, and we received a water utility management award. Through the GAWP, Georgia Association of Water Professionals, we received three awards this year. The third for third consecutive years, we received a platinum award for the water distribution system of excellence award, a platinum for the Hemphill water treatment, as well as a platinum award for the Chattahoochee water treatment. Chattahoochee is extremely excited this year. This is their first platinum award since 2016.

That means that for the last five years, we have maintained 100% compliance, zero violations, providing potable drinking water to the citizens of Atlanta at our two water treatment plants. We also received a water fluoridation quality award for maintaining our fluoride systems through the US Department of Health and Human Services. We also participate in the partnership for safe water safe drinking water with the American Water Works Association. Projects this year through the Design Build Institute of America, the Southeast Region, we received two design build team awards for our repairs to the net Niske Lake Dam as well as the Sugar Creek Basin outfall and trunk and sewer project, which is a consent decree project from for a sewer group five that we completed on time. We also received an award, a certificate of achievements for excellence in financial reporting.

We want to definitely, send kudos to the many women and men of the department. They seek these awards, apply for them, and in some cases, the requirements are very stringent. So we want to highlight the office of financial administration for working with the government finance officer association to receive an achievement of excellence award.

Before we leave those awards, I just wanna point out on these platinum water awards to get, the number that we've received. We have to get 1,400,000 tests right in a row. See, we got it right 1,400,000 times in a row, and that is an amazing achievement. So I'm gonna turn it over to you, assistant commissioner, talk a little bit about achievements.

Good afternoon. I am Hugh Smith, assistant commissioner, operations department of watershed management. To further discuss or display the ability for department of watershed to succeed in spite of, I wanna highlight or we wanna highlight several achievements. We completed some upgrades at the Hemphill Pump Station that was adding new switch gear and generator power to make facility more resilient as it relates to just normal downtime. We also improved our credit rating recently with Standard and Poor's.

We went from a double a negative to a, which will also may will pay dividends as we move forward into the bond market. We're very excited about that. The RM Clayton Water Reclamation Center also completed the round of I think we had nine conditions that we had to meet to to meet the requirements of a recent consent order. We completed those as well. We also improved the, resilience at our Chattahoochee water treatment facility by replacing all of the, finished water pump stations there. And we're on the process of upgrading our connectivity to the Flint River pump station, there again, also to make the system more resilient. So these are key achievements, and, we look forward to, further improving the operations of our system.

Moving ahead, we talked about this a little bit last week at CUC. So couple of these we've already talked about. Other things I wanna point out is plant assessments. Those plant assessments have been completed. We're just now rolling the reports.

I don't have numbers yet of what we're looking at as far as the investment needed in our plants, but that will be added to our resilience strategy for our water main replacements. I mentioned the ADWAR as well. We're in the final stages of selecting the firm that's gonna move forward with that. RM Clayton, we are in the process of doing improvements at RM Clayton to meet the consent order there. We'll be looking at additional revenue generation through our fee schedule.

We do have a study completed. We'll be bringing that forward to the CUC in the coming meetings. I wanna talk a little bit and a little bit deeper dive on water meters and STNG project that we're working with Georgia Tech, and I'll turn that over to you, DCI O'Rackley, to talk a little more in-depth.

Good afternoon. I'm Daphne Rackley, deputy chief information officer, and it's a pleasure to be before you talk about how we're using technology to advance to the department. As you all are quite aware, technology is a major priority for the administration, and becoming a smart utility is a strategic focus area for the Department of Watershed Management. There are multiple initiatives as the commissioner spoke to that are underway to ensure that we have, effective effective water delivery to our customers. And the use of AMI, now we call smart meters, is one such major program underway.

Most of you all or some of you all know that we are we have already initiated a smart meter pilot that consists of a little over four hundred four zero four to be precise, smart meters that are already residing within our infrastructure. We're currently underway with evaluating those technologies, both on the hardware as well as the software side of it and comparing total cost of ownership against across those four different, vendors that are participating. We should be ready to share the results of of this pilot, late July, early August time frame. But one key advantage, of the smart meters is really the ability to enable customers to interact with the utility and to monitor their water usage in near real time, status and data, transforming really how customers view and manage their use of water. But we know that it can transform it if we implement and communicate effectively.

So to ensure that we maximize this opportunity and engage our customers appropriately, we collaborated with Georgia Tech's research institute called STNG program. STNG stands for sparking technology innovation and growth. Well, that program allowed us to work with a cohort of full time researchers to, iterate on and validate solutions to address three primary problems that we posed for them to look at. One problem was how can smart meters be best deployed and utilized to significantly reduce residential and commercial water usage? Another problem we posed to them is in what ways can smart meters be used to engage our customers, making them more aware and proactive in managing water consumption?

And a third problem was how can real time information on water usage be made actionable and useful for customers? Well, over the course of about ten weeks, the STEAM team the STEAM team met with DWM employees, the various AMI, smart meter vendors, and both residential and commercial customers, although we focus more on residential customers to identify major pain points and develop strategies to address each of those three, problems that were posed to them. Well, as of last Friday, so hot off the press, we actually met with STNG and they presented their solutions. Some were long term, others were short term solutions, to those problems. And one such problem was really looking at our bill, looking to redesign the way our bill looks.

And I think the commissioner has some examples of how we can do something right now to change the focus of how, customers view water usage. Right now we're talking CCFs and most people don't talk in CCFs, they talk in gallons. So simple things like emphasizing gallons usage on a bill and re reframing and laying out the way information is displayed. So they also, mentioned a couple of other, technologies too around mobile apps and the, use of proactive text messages around, water leaks, and we're working on those too from a long term strategy. Thank you.

So I I'm holding up an example of our present bill. So here's our present bill. See this? It's present bill.

Yeah.

It's in CCF. We all talk in CCF. You have a hard time figuring out how much you owe. Right? So they're they're like, hey, may maybe look at your bill a little bit. So this is what they proposed our bill look like. So it's very clear how much you are, you know, right up right up front. Usage is in gallons, 3,100 gallons rather than trying to guess how many cc is that three CCF or two cc. So just really simple practical solutions that we can enact now. We don't necessarily have to wait on technology.

So with that, we're gonna thank you very much for listening to us. We're gonna answer any questions you might have.

Thank you, commissioner Eirley and team, for your overview of your proposed budget. Wanna kick questions off with CUC chair, Hillis.

Thank you, mister chair.

Thank you, commissioner Ierle and your team. I'll just start with just reiterating things we've talked about in the past, including as your quarterly last week. This this is really putting it to paper and really shows the concern that I have for watershed and getting these you know, and I'm glad they're in your plans, but getting these long delayed fee studies, the stormwater ordinance, hopefully, as I've stated, and we'll say it again, done and implemented by the end of this year, not next year or not even this coming fiscal year fiscal year, but this the end of this calendar year. So I look forward to working with you all to get the fee study and the stormwater ordinance off the ground, and hopefully, we can begin that process at least through looking at some draft legislation within the next few months. And while it will be a conversation later on down the line, we've also not had a rate study in fourteen ish years.

So once the fee study gets done and the rate study or excuse me, stormwater illness gets done. So, of course, we need to look at at rates, unfortunately. I will say one place we could bring in some revenue is collecting not just from our ratepayers, but from these other local governments. So as I always ask, who are the top local governments owe us money and is number one still DeKalb County at 20 plus million dollars?

24.7.

24.7.

Yeah. I spoke to the director yesterday, and he has in legislation payment for 24,800,000 that's gonna be coming.

Well, I will keep asking you until I hear a much lower number. On the other issues that I bring up quite a bit, what in this budget will enhance you all service and SLAs when it comes to hydrant repairs and restorations?

Yeah. Filling open position will will have the number one impact. Second is really developing a finer ability to connect with, for example, restorations. In order to improve upon restorations, you have to have a way to track those and and really do a better job at tracking restorations. So that's coming. You'll see a focused presentation like the one was last week. You'll see that coming in a coming, feature CUC on hydrants and those type of, restorations. Okay.

Speaking of the positions, I'm I'm glad to hear the plan and goals to bring it up from, I believe, around 82 up to 90. However, it it states in the presentation or the budget book somewhere that you are funding your positions at 100%. So what is the reason behind that reasoning behind that?

We're required to by law

to fund a 100%.

Yep. I thought that was the case. Heard that before. That and I would we just had your quarterly last week, so I've, you know, reiterated what I need to reiterate. And, again, look forward to working with you all on the peace study and the stormwater ordinance. But I will leave it at that at that and defer to my colleagues. I don't wanna get in between anyone and lunch. So thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Martin.

Thank you. I'll be very, very brief. This is my first time meeting you, commissioner Arleigh. So pleasure to meet you finally, and hopefully we can spend some time together. Besides his choice in SEC football teams, deputy commissioner Smith is okay with me.

My my questions are very, very quick. I need to know, there's a current kind of dispute going on with the city of Sandy Springs. I went down to GMA training, council council member Worthy and I a few weeks ago. And the city of Sandy Springs is just really one of the council members reached out to me and said there's there's a dispute going on with infrastructure, upkeep, maintenance. And before it escalates any further, I just wanted to go on the record and say, like, can we please have a conversation with them and figure out what is they're looking to do and accomplish so that we can move forward. I don't know if you all are aware of this. Just can't he called me this morning. I was like, I'm meeting with the team. So just wanted to put that in front of you. And you can certainly react if you'd like.

Not that that that's all I want. I'll I'll share with that as we talk about, you know, other municipalities owing us money. They feel like they need some attention up there. I'll put it like that. The the the other thing is commissioner Smith deputy commissioner Smith worked worked with me on an issue around the commercial requirement for sewer even when it's not feasible.

And I wanna make sure that we can is there a legislative fix needed for that? Or I know that I know that, in the part of my district that is sort of near the city limits, it's it was very rural back in the day when I was a kid, which is not that long ago. Some of them were pastors out there. And so as we think about this the we developing, thinking about the neighborhood, reinvestment initiative that the mayor is pushing, I wanna make sure that we I think a lot of that's going to start to become more of an issue, and I think we need to develop a process for it. And so, this may be a discussion we can have offline.

Less a budget issue, more of an operational issue, but it can become a budget issue because I think we're gonna see more of these kinds of requests come forth as we develop that part of the city. And so I want to put that on your radar as well. But other than that, thank you for being here today. I'm looking forward to continuing to inter interface with you all as we build a better and stronger city. Thank you. You, mister chair.

Thank you. Next, we have council member Norwood, then council member Doji.

Thank you. Excellent presentation. As we are moving forward with storm water utility, which I really understand. I get it. But I think two things we need to say. Number one is we haven't changed their water bill. We have not changed their water fee in all of these years. I just think it's so important for people to just be aware. And then secondly, the idea of the 99% and Commissioner, you talked about that last week and that we are so close and can we free up any of that money. And I think that's really important.

And as counsel, we wanna help in any way we can because that makes sense. If you're at 99.7%, and getting to a 100% is a, pretty impossible and b, doesn't have the return on investment. We know we've got issues that we that we wanna get addressed, in water and and storm water and wastewater. And the last thing I wanna say is a compliment because I don't know who sent the guys out yesterday, but it was on the news that they were cleaning storm drains, and they were preparing for the huge rainfall last night. And I did not get any calls in my in my area saying it's backed up.

I'm flooded. So, thank the staff, those guys that got out there in the rain and and really made that happen. So, let me know how I can help.

Thank you. Councilmember Dozier.

Thank you, mister chair. I'll I'll be brief. Commissioner, know we just had the presentation just last week, so I promise is is one question. There's a couple parts to it, but you can probably answer on one fell swoop. For the storm water utility, when will the task force that's being established get stood up? Number two, who will be part of that task force? I know at least one member reached out to me wanting to talk about potential sort of things that I wanna see included in those conversations. So I imagine there's been some outreach that's been ongoing with regards to that. And number three, what is the projection for revenue that we think could potentially come from this were it to be established? So, yeah, that's it.

Task force is weeks away. We just got to go ahead to go ahead and try to get it up and not necessarily have all those details of who's doing what. But we, I think, have a good representation. I'd be interested to know what other, you know, outside representation we might need other than our council members, but we do have, I think, a diverse representation. And then what kinda what kinda revenues would we generate?

Depends on what we set the rate at. So the way it is currently the study is written and the way we currently calculate is per square foot of impervious surface to the individual property. And at 4¢ per square foot, that would generate 36,000,000 a year. We think we have about our study indicates we have about $200,000,000 worth of the needs a year. And in order to get above at least a million, a 100,000,000 a year, we would have to set the rate closer to 12¢.

So where where that rate gets set will be determining factor on what will what we'll be able to collect. Also, the task force, you know, as we shape that legislation, we'll be able to help us with, you know, are there exemptions? Are there ways to get credits for individual property by, know, doing mitigation on that property? And and so those are all things that can shape that legislation.

Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Mister

Alright. Thank you. Commissioner, in my short tenure tenure on council, it seems like we've had more of a reactionary defensive posture on how we've dealt with storm water issues in the city. And it seems like we're finally starting to get in one that's more proactive. You think about the Custer Avenue relief project, some other green infrastructure projects that we have going on around the city. I'm curious about just from an operational standpoint, what infrastructure issues keep you up at night? What if What infrastructure issues throughout the city keep you up at night?

Water is keeps me up at night the most. And the reason I say that is from my past experiences. In Iowa, I was I lived through the two thousand eight flood in Cedar Rapids that destroyed destroyed that city. And the wastewater treatment plant was destroyed. However, the water plants survived.

And the city survived because we had water. And without water, it can be a perfect chamber of commerce day here in Atlanta. But if we don't have water, the city is stopped, dead in its tracks. I lived through the effects of hurricane Harvey and hurricane Barrel in Houston. In 2024, Houston was hit with hurricane Barrel. We were without power in many places for a week in Houston. The wastewater plants were down. We're not treating. Our pump stations were down, but our water system survived. City didn't have power.

It didn't have wastewater, but it had water. The city survived because we had water. So that's what keeps me awake at night. There is no wastewater without water. Flooding, we can work to mitigate that. It's a long term project here in Atlanta. We have more difficult conditions with flooding than the vast majority of this country. It rains like Houston here, but we have the topography of West Virginia. And that is a more complicated problem than in Houston. So we have a more complicated problem here in Atlanta.

Plus, we have history where we have people, whether voluntary or involuntary, put in put in harm's way where they can be flood affected more often than other people. And so we have to fix those issues.

You know, thank you for that answer. And, you know, I was happy to hear about the platinum awards. I think at its core, you know, we are supposed to provide clean drinking water for the citizens of Atlanta. And, you know, I go out there every time I'm out. I drink Chattahoochee's finest because I trust your team and making sure that we have clean drinking water.

And so I know that we're working on a lot of our storm water capacity issues throughout the city, and, I think this council is still, you know, looking forward to helping us be able to come kinda complete some of these major projects that we have going on. So thank you for your over overview of your FY twenty seven proposed budget. We thank you, for all for showing up, and we'll continue these conversations going forward. So with that, for our viewing public, we will be going on a recess now for the rest of well, for an hour. At 01:30, we will continue our afternoon budget hearings.

We will have Atlanta Information Management followed by Department of Parks and Recreation, and then we will close out our day with the Department of Customer Service. Thank you all. We are now adjourned for recess. We welcome chief Sankey. If you don't mind introducing your team, and I'll I'll turn it over to you.

Good afternoon, city council members. I am Jason Sankey, and I am proud to say that I have served as the chief information officer for the city of Atlanta and leading the Department of Atlanta Information Management for the past five years. This first slide represents our organizational structure, and I will ask my team to introduce themselves starting with my far left.

Good afternoon. Chloe Broome, AIM chief administrative officer.

Good afternoon. Donald Graham, chief information security officer.

Good afternoon. Kintore Garman, deputy chief information officer.

Good afternoon. Daphne Rackley, deputy chief information officer.

Good afternoon. Kamal Makini, deputy chief information officer.

Okay. In FY twenty six, we advanced key priorities across public safety, cybersecurity, operational efficiency, digital modernization, workforce readiness, and equitable community access. Highlights include implementing enhanced security infrastructure and cyber defense protocols, advancing body worn camera technology in partnership with public safety, supporting belt line camera installations to improve situational awareness, realizing approximately $1,000,000 in savings and another $2,000,000 in revenue. We deployed Copilot chat citywide to improve employee access with approved AI supported solutions. We will obtain our what city works, work what works city certification, which is a Bloomberg philanthropies program, which establishes a standard for data driven, well managed local governments.

Approximately 110 cities across The US have the certification. We expanded citywide learning opportunities through Tech Tuesdays. We strengthened shared understanding of IT service delivery through IT certifications for all staff, and we continue to expand IT kiosks to support more connected, informed, and engaged communities. Looking forward to FY twenty seven priorities, In partnership with Public Safety and Dean, we will finalize the implementation of a fully integrated tier three data center to strengthen operational resilience, business continuity, and disaster recovery capabilities. We will advance Citi's cybersecurity maturity by continuing our alignment to zero trust framework, enhancing identity management, advancing endpoint protection, and network segmentation.

We plan to strengthen enterprise wide cyber resilience through proactive risk management, security awareness initiatives and continuous monitoring to ensure critical city services and resident data remain secure. We will deliver measurable fiscal stewardship by achieving an additional $2,000,000 in operational savings, cost avoidance, and technology rebates through strategic sourcing, optimization, and modernization efforts. We plan to generate an additional $3,000,000 in revenue. We will launch a citywide data governance and open data modernization program to improve transparency, accountability, data quality, and data driven decisions, making access available throughout all departments. We plan to initiate a multiyear capital improvement program to modernize and refresh the city's core network and infrastructure, improving reliability, scalability, security, and long term sustainability.

We will continue to advance the city's artificial intelligence strategy with a focus on generative AI, agentic AI, advanced machine learning, and workforce AI literacy to drive innovation and responsible adoption across government services. We plan to maximize the city's fiber network as critical civic infrastructure, strengthening connectivity, resiliency, smart city capabilities, and future ready digital services. We plan to expand public Wi Fi access citywide, providing traditionally underserved communities with access and closing the digital divide to improve equitable access to education, workforce opportunities, and city services. These priorities ensure technology investments are designed to create equitable outcomes, improve accessibility, and enhance quality for every resident and neighborhood. As of February 2026, our total headcount of field positions was at 93.

And looking at our proposed f y twenty seven budget, there's a net decrease of 2% with the bulk of that reduction in contracted services. As I mentioned, our f y twenty seven priorities identified $2,000,000 of potential savings, which will absorb this decrease. We make financial, stewardship a priority, which is reflected in our current FY twenty six projection. And since joining the city, our budget has aligned with our expenditures year over year. Lastly, I wanna thank, the AIM team for all of their hard work and commitment in supporting this great city, and we would be happy to answer any questions at this time.

Thank you, chief Sankey. Especially thank you for a very succinct presentation, getting to the numbers. So definitely appreciate that. We'll start questions from council members and starting with council member Doji.

Thank you, mister chair, and thank you chief Sankey. One thing I do wanna acknowledge, because I know we don't always get to experience this as children of the eighties, but there's more there's more Jason's in this room than we typically have. So between Jason Ingram and Jason Sankey, Jason West, and Jason Doja. I wanna acknowledge that because we don't always get enough love even if our genetics colleagues don't wanna acknowledge us younger folks. Just a couple questions.

I asked this question of APD yesterday, and one thing that comes up a lot in conversations that we have about our surveillance technology that we're implementing across the city is how are we protecting the the data that we're collecting from our constituents, from our communities, how are making sure that it's secure, how we know it's not going to the wrong hands, how are we making sure that it's being used for the purposes that we want it to be used for. And so I was curious, do we have any sort of data maintenance or data any sort of policy that would benefit the public good to make sure that we're not using this information in

the incorrect way. Cecil Graham, you wanna take that?

Thank you. Thank you for

that question. We do have policies in place, and we also follow the standards of protecting data by encrypting at rest and also using different technology to encrypt in motion. So those are some of the standards we use. We're always looking at how data is processed. We have 20 fourseven monitoring of the data. So we take that very seriously using all the standards from this all the way down to our operating procedures.

Thank you. And I guess my question is even beyond just data as a whole, but specifically surveillance technology that we're implementing as well. I specifically asked chief Sherbaugham yesterday if APD had any sort of surveillance or data retention policy. And I've I've seen what we are using for the Vic, but I wonder if there might be an opportunity to have a conversation about just the rise of AI, the rise of the use of surveillance technology. Know, Atlanta's the most surveilled city in the country.

Wanna make sure that we are getting ahead of the conversation and being responsive to the concerns that community members are having about who's collecting information, where is it going, and making sure that, especially with the proliferation of private companies, whether it's a flock or a Palantir in this political environment that we're getting people on edge. And I think the more robust we could have with the policy and maybe even a report a regular report out on how our surveillance technology is being utilized and the extent in which it's being utilized so people know what cameras exist in their communities without disrupting the the sort of operational public safety sort of secrecy that is in place to keep communities safe. Know that there's a reason for that as well, but I think the more we can be transparent is the more we can be accountable on that issue.

And and I appreciate that question, and I mentioned one of our priorities in FY twenty seven is to really focus around data governance. So we have 30 ish departments across the city, all with their own data sets and really having the steward to be responsible from a departmental perspective with owning their data, how that data is used. As Cecil Graham mentioned, we will ensure that we make sure that it's kept in line with data privacy controls and secure. But as far as how that data is used currently is governed on a department level. Okay. We're trying to create that governance citywide to oversee how we govern that data, how we share that data, and ultimately how we protect that data.

Okay. Thank you. And then had another question about the rollout of our partnership with Ike. I recognize so there's two kind of aspects of that. One is that the easier question, I'm curious what our revenue generation looks like from that partnership.

I recognize that there is a portion of those advertising revenues that goes back to that company, but I'm I'm curious what that looks like for the city and for the city's component. So if there's that's information that y'all have or Department of Finance might have, I would love to get get a sense of what that looks like. And then the other piece is because I mean, there's they're sexy devices. So a lot of people in my community really want them, but because of specific sort of guidelines that we've put in place about public right away or we measure out how much space on the sidewalk, they're not always feasible in the places that that we want them installed. So I'm curious kind of what that partnership looks like beyond World Cup.

I know a lot of new installations are happening downtown to assist with wayfinding talk to World Cup, but there still continues to be a huge demand for these devices in my communities across its across my district. So we'll we'll have to get a sense of what a mistaking as far as that rollout.

Okay. So to the first question regarding revenue, so we have deployed those kiosks over the course of the past four years, and we are leading among other cities across The United States in advertising revenue. The city, just to remind everyone, we did not pay anything for this program, but we've realized approximately $4,000,000 over the course of these four years. And the revenue that I mentioned in my presentation, we're looking at considering World Cup is coming growth, and we're anticipating in FY '27 a $3,000,000 increase. And that's a fifty fifty split with the company after all of the maintenance and operational deductions are taken.

As far as partnership and the implementation of the kiosks and where they're located, there's a team that is responsible for meeting, and I'm hope hopeful that these meetings are taking place with city council to talk about placement and get the approval and go through that rigorous process. But to your point, there are some restrictions. There are some right of ways that the city doesn't own. They're they're state owned. So once we get through all of that planning, that's when the decision is made. I will say this past year, we did put forth legislation that was approved to increase the number of Ike Yas from 120 to two twenty. So there are opportunities to continue to expand throughout each district.

Oh, thank you for that. And I'll say too, I I have been meeting with your team. Typically, as once the locations have been picked and they try to vet to make sure that I agree with that location. But being able to talk even further out as far as when when the the ideation phase is still happening, I think that would be helpful for us so we can get them in more parts of our district.

We could certainly move that forward.

Alright. Well, mister chair, mister Jason West, thank you so much. I I yield the floor.

Alright. Thank you. Councilmember Lewis. I was gonna say the same thing. We I was able to

work with Ike, Smart City, IKEA, and we've been able to get them all over District 12. I'm super happy about the Pittsburgh and the Metropolitan because it was a upgrade in information that we didn't even have, and we talk about the business community in Pittsburgh that a lot of people didn't even know existed except us, man. So I'm super happy about that. Thank you. The questions I had were around I left Roselle Fan this morning. We had a a t for our sin for our mothers, a t follow our mothers. And the one issue we had in the gym was our Wi Fi was not working. I know we spent about 300 where are we on the Wi Fi, Roselle fan?

So I will look into the specifics about the issues that occurred recently, but that has been upgraded as of last fiscal year. So we upgraded all the Wi Fi. So we will definitely look into performance and ensure that this was just a one off scenario and not something that is widespread within the infrastructure?

So we we took about $50,000 from our our district, and we put took a 100 k from our district. 50 in Roselle Fan, 50 in Pitman Park, and to upgrade the upgrade the information in there. I I basically put PlayStation fives. I put GoPros. I put drones. We put we just bought equipment for the gym today. Actually, they're gonna roll it out. In fact, I wanna make sure I'm specific because it means a lot to me to know that today I was there, Wi Fi was not working for me for me, not just saying the 100 seniors that we had there and the folks that from the equipment center. So let me tell you what we put in there first to because you can say, hey. Maybe you're stressing the system.

What we put in Roselle Fan today was 28 laptops, one vibe board, a smart board, two digital displays, two three d printers, a storage rack, boat kits, 15 drones, 15 headsets, and we purchased high speed Wi Fi. We put power on every single station. We work with Georgia Power to to outfit this room. This is funding coming from my office. And so imagine walking through that building knowing you just spent 50,000, knowing that we work with c CFO Baller working with you all to upgrade the Wi Fi, and the stuff might not work.

And so I'm I'm super hopeful that you all are able to get over and just test it. Just make sure that we have the right power surges. Because I wouldn't know I don't know the terminology I need, but I I figure you all do, and we we just trying to make sure our kids have something to do this summer. So if you can go over to the recreation centers and make sure that the Wi Fi is working, and don't ask the people at the recreation center. They're gonna tell me. They wanna keep their jobs. So if you can, someone in your department because my phone doesn't my stuff my stuff doesn't work there. So I would love if you send someone over and do the same thing. Thank you. Thank you, chair.

Alright. Thank you. Councilmember Boone.

Yes, I wanna thank you all so much for doing a wonderful, wonderful job. You all have really been very responsive to us and we appreciate that. We definitely I too wanna echo the fact that we would love for all of our rec centers to have upgraded computers, make sure that everything is working properly. Just go and visit. Make sure that everything because now you have to pay your bills online.

A lot of our seniors are going in using the computers more, and it would be great if you all would just make sure we are up to snuff and we do not have a lot of outdated equipment, equipment that works sometimes. 10 computers and four only work. That does not look good for the city of Atlanta. So we are concerned about the digital divide and making sure that our communities and those folks that need a little assistance can go to our rec centers and do a resume writing class. They can work on how to pay their bills online.

Thank you so much for all you all do. Please let us know what we can do, especially the big ones. The big ones. C. T. Martin, Flanagan, MLKing, a lot of the Roosevelt fan, William Walker, Adams Park, all of them. Collier, heavily, heavily. Let's get some good computers. Make sure they don't have these computers from 02/1819 still just sitting there that the students are not using in the back to school program. Come up with some great ideas for us. We want our communities to be very, very progressive. Thank you.

Alright. Thank you. Council member one.

Thank you, mister chair, and thank you, commissioner, for the presentation. Couple questions. You talked about your goals for 2027, and I I wanna lean into the 2,000,000 in savings and rebate rebates and 3,000,000 in revenue. Your thoughts on your strategy on that. I I it's kind of a jump from where you think you're gonna landing on FY '26. I'm kinda just curious as those are great goals, but I'm just curious as to what the path is to that.

So during this past year, we did a deep dive into our fees that we've been paying to various vendors. And what we identified through that analysis is some money that the city was charged that should not have been charged. So we're in we're already anticipating the rebates. The rebates in the area of around 1,600,000.

Okay.

So that's the majority of that. We we also have been talking to other vendors, and we have renegotiated some savings. As an example, in partnership with Xerox, they just let us know today that we'll be receiving about, $165,000 in rebates. So we're proactively working, with the investments that the city, continues to to have with these larger contracts to figure out are there cost saving opportunities? Is the city getting charged what we should?

When you get invoices that are 10,000 pages long, it's difficult to get through. But now that we have the capabilities of AI, it makes it much easier for us. So we're it's easier for us to identify these cost savings upfront.

What about on the revenue side? Is it the same approach?

The revenue side has been based on conversations with Orange Barrel Media who Okay. Owns the the kiosks. Yeah.

It's interesting. I I actually thought you were going a different direction with that. I mean, you know, with AI right now, do are are y'all working with the departments that actually generate revenue through fees, registration, all that to assist with maybe looking at unbilled revenue, if that makes any sense. So I think about, like, business licenses. You know, to me, that's where y'all could also be helpful to go in and analyze, okay, these are this is someone who is paid for x number of years or are or missing years. Is that something y'all assist with as well?

That is something that we can provide assistance to. And just to to be clear, this cost savings was just in AIMS budget.

Yeah.

So citywide, we have identified other cost saving opportunities enterprise wide. And, yes, we do support departments and taking those deeper dives.

Where where or I'm gonna presume the answer is yes, but where do y'all plug into procurement to look at enterprise wide purchases, consolidation, efficiencies, reductions, eliminations? How do y'all plug into that process?

So From a strictly procurement cycle process? Mhmm. Okay. So we we've been in conversations with chief Houston on how do we advance technology to oversee that end to end process, starting with the departments, continuing with Department of Law, going to procurement and then ultimately getting to that end state. Procurement recently moved forward with a proof of concept on a small piece within their department, but we continue those conversations to see what technologies can advance the end to end process because that's just one small blip, but we need to look at it end to end.

And we have been in conversations. We don't have an active project or initiative right now, but we are open in having those conversations on the right time for procurement to move that forward.

Okay. And and then I guess I was also looking at it from a department wants to source technology, either hardware or software. It's been something I've been harping on a little bit is that all of a sudden we've got the base contract and then departments start piling on and there's there, I think, built in inefficiencies in that. Technology is one of those things that spans across every department, be it hardware, software, or or other services. So are are y'all involved or at least partnering with procurement when solicitations and RFPs are being developed to make recommendations as to again consolidation, elimination, reductions, expansions.

Do y'all do y'all really play a role in that?

Historically, not as much as we should. However, this year, we did a revamp of our architectural review board. So the way it worked before, a department can go out, they can meet with vendors and start talking about a solution, and then it comes to technology. And that's kinda after the fact. So what we do now through our office of infrastructure technology and our business relationship management arm is we meet with departments upfront with vendors.

So we're part of that conversation in the beginning. So we can talk about whether or not we already have technology that can handle this or we have to purchase something new, what the security controls are so we get our CISO involved. That has matured over the past six months.

Okay. I'll put a pin in this one because I do see a lot of based on your response to me, do see a lot of opportunity here to address some of the concerns I've expressed about just, you know, us our departments not talking to each other before we go out and make a a significant purchase. And, again, I I feel like y'all are are a good, consistent use across all all departments. Your FTE count right now, you have 35 vacancies. Do you know the breakout of how many of those are funded and how many are unfunded?

I believe we have two that are funded.

Okay. So you're at I see that there is a 22 a reduction of 22 FDEs going in from fifth 26 to 27. What's the nature of the that those reductions? Are they abolishing unfunded vacant positions, or is it something else?

That is correct. We're abolishing unvacant positions that haven't been filled in years.

Great. And then my final question is the reduction in purchasing contract services of $800,000. What's the nature of that? The description in the budget book doesn't really inform what you're thinking.

So in that line item is all of our contractual obligations.

Mhmm.

So going back to the savings that we identified, we have identified roughly 2,000,000 so we can come down in those contracted services. The 800,000, that still leaves us with a $1,200,000 cushion.

So it's really more of a really more of a a target objective versus an actual it's just taking what we have and getting it for less. Is that correct? There's not like an elimination of a certain category of purchase services that's resulting in that.

No. It's it's a hard dollar savings where the city month over month pays x. We will pay y in the future.

Okay. I'm just gonna close with I I appreciate the approach of reduction and savings and all that. I would say though for me, your department is one where I would not I would have been comfortable with the flat, if not more. I I I always worry about our IT and our infrastructure. I think about vulnerability.

I think about increased cyber attacks. You know, I I was on Emory emergency ops call this morning, and they were talking about how the Iran conflict is actually driving a lot more AI generated attacks on technology infrastructure. And, yeah, y'all are kind of the frontline or or we rely on y'all to be in the frontline to protect us. And so as everyone else gets smarter and the the bad guys out there get smarter, you know, I would just want y'all to be resourced up appropriately to defend against that. So I just you know, I know y'all do a lot with a little, and I I appreciate you're doing that.

But to the extent that, you know, we have to be honest with ourselves that that defen the offense against us on that front is only gonna increase over time. And so I hope that you and your staff and your team will raise your hands at the appropriate time if there are resources that we need, to keep ourselves safe, our taxpayers safe, our residents, our businesses, and our visitors safe, then then you will let us know. So with that, thank you, mister Cherry Hill.

Thank you. And I will say also for me that purchase contract services, number reduction kinda stuck out for me as well and not to just kinda harp on council member one's point. You know, a lot of your core functions are, you know, mitigating risk and dealing with vulnerabilities that we have as a city. Many of these conversations happen, you know, in executive session confidentially with counsel. And so I think we all are well aware of a lot of the risk associated, with the functions of your of your duties.

And so, you know, that number stuck out for me as well and being one that we I think we wanna make sure that you all are fully, I would say, funded to make sure that you're able to continue to keep this this city of Atlanta safe from various vulnerabilities that we have. And so I think those are conversations that we should probably continue as we move through this budget process, and making sure that you all are confident that you have what you need going forward. So, any other questions, comments from colleagues? Seeing none, thank you for your overview of your proposed budget. Everyone, we are going to swiftly, transition over to the Department of Parks and Recreation, and we'll have commissioner Cutler come up with his team. Thank you all. Appreciate

it. Thank you.

Ready when you

are. Alright, everyone. We are ready to get started with our with our next budget hearing briefing, which is the Department of Parks and Recreation, and we welcome up commissioner Cutler. You don't mind introducing your team, and then we'll let you get started.

Yeah. Well, thank you, chair Weston and members of the Atlanta City Council Budget Committee. Today, I'm honored to be here today to present the proposal for fiscal year twenty twenty seven budget for the Department of Parks and Recreation. I'm joined by my esteemed colleagues to my left and my right and the 500 plus women and men of the Department of Parks and Recreation. To my left, I have Rachel Marr, deputy commissioner of partnerships and enterprise.

To my immediate left, I have deputy commissioner Doug Voss over park and recreation operations. To my right, I have senior director, Henry Thompson, who's over budget and finance. And to my far right, I have Galen deputy deputy commissioner doctor Galen Williams over park planning and design. Well, every day oh, and I also wanna give a special shout out to deputy commissioner Dudley who couldn't be here today due to an unforeseen family emergency, so, thoughts are with her. Every day our team works hard to serve our neighbors and provide exceptional parks and recreation experiences.

From after school to summer camps, seniors to top programming, golf, tennis, parks, forestry, transportation, and administration to make it all happen. We are a team of parks and recreation professionals that are leading the way and showing the world what a group project can do for parks and recreation. In fiscal year twenty twenty seven, we will invest over $30,000,000 in programming, facilities, transportation, summer meals, jobs, internships, and scholarships for our young people. This is an investment in our youth and our future that will ripple through time. Our investment today in parks and recreation will create future council members, mayors, senators, governors, lawyers, doctors, influencers, and artists just as Camp Best Friends has done for the last forty five years in our Department of Parks and Recreation.

Our mission and our vision is what centers our work. Our mission is to provide equitable access to outstanding recreational, natural, and cultural experiences that enhance the happiness, health, and well-being of all Atlantans. Our vision is to make parks and recreation parks the heart and soul of Atlanta through a diverse yet seamless and interconnected system of parks and natural areas. Our Activate ATL goals embody this work through invest in Atlanta's parks and recreation assets, connect Atlanta's parks and recreation resources, and grow the parks and recreation system. Our team is honored to work with each of you to create vibrant neighborhoods that make Atlanta the best major city to thrive and raise every child.

Now let's dive in. This here is a slide of our organizational chart. The Department of Parks and Recreation oversees various aspects related to parks and recreation and community engagement within our jurisdiction. The department is comprised of four divisions and 11 offices that aim to make recreation and parks the heart and soul of Atlanta through a diverse yet seamless and interconnected systems of parks and recreation natural areas. First, the division of administration strategy.

This office serves as a central hub of administrative tasks, strategic planning, and fostering innovation within the department. It coordinates resources, manages budgets, and develops long term strategies to enhance parks and recreation services. It supports the department's communication and marketing efforts as well. Next, the division of operations. The operations division oversees the following offices of parks, recreation, natural resources, public safety, and special events.

The office of parks is responsible for the management, maintenance, and development of all parks within our jurisdiction. This includes ensuring parks are safe, clean, and accessible to the public. The office oversees park programming and events. This includes maintenance of the beltline as well and also skilled services and forestry. The office of recreation focus on providing quality recreational opportunities and programming for community members of all ages that are balanced, equitable, and affordable.

This includes organizing sports leagues, fitness classes, cultural events, and other recreational activities to promote community health and well-being. Next, we have the office of natural resources. This is our newest office. The office of natural resources is responsible for management, maintenance, and access to public trees, natural areas, and community gardens. Our arborist and forestry team crews are responsible for managing all the trees along the 1,420 linear miles of right away and four four four thousand five hundred and fifty four acres of parkland.

Our our natural areas are our fastest growing acres due to the Tree Trust Fund and several acquisitions we made recently. The Office of Public Safety is responsible for the Park Ranger program, camera installations and maintenance, alarm system inspection, safety and programming, and training of all departmental staff. The Office of Special Events plans coordinates and manages public events, festivals, and gatherings held within parks and recreational spaces, including permitting and reservation approvals. The division of partnerships and enterprise. This is a new division that's been around for three years.

This office works to establish and maintain partnerships with other organizations, businesses, and community groups, including our conservancies and friends groups to enhance parks and recreation services by leveraging external resources and expertise. The department can expand its reach and offer a wide range of programs and amenities to the public. To that end, this year in fiscal year twenty six, our general fund budget was just over 57,000,000. Philanthropy alone has invested over $21,000,000 in parks and recreation. So for every dollar invested in the general fund, that equates to 38¢ from the philanthropic community.

And many of those organizations are in the room today. So I would just like to say thank you to those organizations for their fiscal support and for their fundraising and volunteer efforts. So thank you. Also, division of park planning and design. They handle the design, planning, and development of new parks and park improvements.

This office collaborates with various stakeholders, including architects, urban planners, friends groups, community members, neighbors to create functional and aesthetically pleasing parks and spaces that meet community needs. These offices work together to cohesively ensure that our parks and recreation facilities are well managed, accessible, and contribute to the overall quality of life in our community. Now let's review fiscal year twenty six. In fiscal year twenty six, we are celebrating the forty fifth anniversary of summer of Camp Best Friends programming in the city of Atlanta. Now please raise your hand if Camp Best Friends has impacted your life or the life of somebody you know.

Okay. I believe almost everybody in this room raised their hand, and I think that shows the forty five years of impact of Camp Best Friends. This was due to the vision of Maynard Jackson during the Atlanta missing and murdered children event that occurred in the early eighties. And thanks to his leadership, we've been going strong now for over forty five years. The Atlanta Teen Leaders Academy reached a major milestone of achieving the highest enrollment of serving over 1,078 teens.

Our footprint continues to grow to 17 recreation centers, two at promise centers, and soon to be opening a third in Southwest. We also hosted the hope meets promise conference during spring break in conjunction with Atlanta Police Foundation and served over a 192 teens. Teens After Dark initiative, which we opened during, winter break, offering evening program from six to 11PM with an average of 83 teens per night. And this, in May, shortly, we'll be celebrating the graduating class of 35 seniors collectively earning over $13,000,000 in, financial aid and scholarships. Our national senior games had saw over 52 seniors from many of our major recreation centers.

Three seniors received gold medals, five silver, one bronze, and numerous fourth and eighth place finishes. In addition to our seniors and our youth, we're also investing in our staff through training and professional development. Collectively, the apartment employees have participated in over 80 trainings in fiscal year twenty six. This includes a certified landscape professional course with University of Georgia, which graduated over 20 staff members. Our park maintenance field day and trainings at Adams Park in March 2026 focusing on safety, proper field maintenance techniques and practices and partnerships with the University of Georgia, celebrate the certification of 17 landscape professionals through an additional six month UGA training.

Our ASI team has and data performance team have taken courses on lean six sigma green belt and black belt training in order to do continuous improvement. Recreation Foundation is of Excellence Summit delivered high impact workshops on leadership, accountability, customer service program innovation, and program delivery sharing best practices to elevate service delivery and offered 30 different courses. And we also collaborated collaborated with HR and the organizational development team to establish a process for training frontline staff via in person and webinar trainings to make sure that everybody has access to training no matter where they work. We also implemented some park improvements, successfully maintained high standards in park operations by reopening and enhancing facilities and parks, meeting service level agreements, performance target targets. We also added to our inventory, included purchasing the DeForest Avenue and Warren Road Avenue parks, Kimsin Park, an acquisition adjacent to Chosewood, and others adding over 20 acres to the existing park inventory.

We also climbed on the Trust Republic land ranking in 2025. At the end of 2025, they released their park score index ranking with Atlanta advancing from twenty fifth to twenty first among the largest 100 US cities nationwide, our highest finish in park score history. Our park rangers and safety team enhanced safety measures in our parks, including expanding our park ranger capacity from eight to 11 and increasing surveillance coverage by 40 cameras and a 172 streams, bringing our total streams to over 2,051 streams in our parks and recreation centers. The all these cameras are integrated into the, video integration center, which is monitored and supported by APD. Our office of natural resource was also recognized as tree cities of the world designee for its commitment to sustainable urban forestry.

There's also many other accomplishments from our transportation team, transports 426 schools from 25 school daily, transports over 30 seniors, four to five times per week for prime time senior programs. We support midnight basketball, which is housed in the mayor's office of constituent services. We're now up to season 10 at a multisite league with 16 men's team and eight women's teams totaling totaling 260 athletes. We also supported, shelter operations at four centers, including Old Adamsville, Central Park, Selena Butler, Reverend James Orange, activated from November 9 through March 17. We had 39 activations serving over 7,602 patrons.

And as you know, shelters are vital to resources for unhoused patrons and essential for community services. Our athletic athletics team kicked off, taught soccer and youth soccer this year along with adult softball and adult basketball league, as well as an interdepartmental softball league. And our girls participation continues to grow as well with our second annual, and we also had a second annual volunteer appreciation banquet. On the nutrition side, we served over 165,000 meals at 22 out of school sites. This summer, we'll be at 55 feeding sites, eight mobile sites, and 23 City Of Atlanta Recreation Centers, in addition to 24 unaffiliated community sites, three outdoor pools, and six Fulton County libraries and one park.

So our goal this summer is to make sure that no child goes hungry. And our aquatics team continues to increase availability to provide lessons and instruction, operates the outdoor pools and splash pads while continue to add innovative program including water volleyball, waterline dancing, and seasonal special events. This slide is just a small representation of the amazing work of the men and women of the Department of Parks and Recreation. We have Jenny Drake Park ribbon cutting, the recently opened Bessie Branham Park. We have our park ranger team, mentioned about our Trust Republic Land Park score, Camp Best Friends, Tree City USA, Teens After Dark, and many other activities that are taking place throughout Atlanta.

As we look ahead to fiscal year '27, we're really excited about all of these activities and so much more, including our new Throne Lab bathrooms, which will increase bathroom access across the city at Cascade Springs, Isabel Webster Gates, Walton Springs, Central, John C. Howell sorry, John C. Calhoun, Hardy Ivy, and four along the belt line for people who need to go. Also, we're improving our golf services. We're introducing a new golf golf initiative called the inaugural

Tup Cup, which is

a citywide junior tournament at Alfred Tup Homes in partner with in partnership with the Alfred Tup Homes Family Foundation and at FootGolf at Candler Park Course, which opens May 16. We've recently acquired, the Hamilton e Home 404 Hamilton E Homes and the Bunnen property off of Randall Mill and Buckhead, both quality land parcels that'll be developed into parks when we begin the planning process this coming fiscal year. We'll also be making Atlanta your own gym. This is in partnership with Fulton County Health Department. This campaign encourages residents to use Atlanta's parks, trails, and public spaces as accessible fitness resources supporting the national goal of helping 27,000,000 Americans become physically active.

We'll also be expanding our senior programs in partnership with HealthSpring to provide evidence based activities. In addition, we'll have a youth dance program at C. T. Martin beginning 2026, having free classes as well as, out of school time engagements, for dancers. In addition to that, ACTIVATE APL ATL strategic plan will commence the development of the next iteration of our five year strategic plan.

We're also working on our geospatial strategic plan, adopting a geospatial strategy or GIS to move Atlanta forward with data, tools, technology, and decision making framework to deliver services more equitably, operate more effectively, and accelerate its vision of becoming a smarter, more proactive city of Atlanta. We'll also be initiating our urban forest master plan, and we will be seeking reaccreditation, through the National Recreation and Parks Association as well. Here are some examples of the highlights that you can expect in fiscal year twenty seven, including the acquisition of Tatum Lakes, which we accomplished and will be planning, the Chattahoochee Brick site, company site in Atlanta Riverlands, Memorial Drive Greenway, and we'll also be hosting the Greater and Greener Conference in in 2028 in partnership with the City Park Alliance and Park Pride. Now let me turn it over to deputy commissioner Doug Boss to walk you through our position count and then director Henry Thompson to talk about our budget.

Thank you, commissioner. This slide represents the department's total headcount from the general fund as of February 19. On that date, we had a total of 31 vacancies out of 358 total positions representing a 9% general fund vacancy rate. Other 31 vacancies from the general fund, 19 were from recreation, five in parks, and seven from administration. And since February 19, several of these vacancies have been filled.

Others are in the process or have been submitted to VRB, and we're very appreciative. We actually received 11 approvals just last week for posting. In addition to the full time staff, the department relies heavily on seasonal staff every year. Wanna shout out our team for doing an excellent job of hiring this year. Currently, we have 427 staff either pending or approved to start for CBF. That includes a 151 teams. We also have 96 staff either pending or approved to start for aquatics, as well as additional seasonal staff for both parks and golf operations. And I'll turn it over to Henry at this time.

Thank you, BC boss. Good afternoon, council members. Excuse me. Good afternoon, council members. DPR's FY '27 proposed budget is 54,600,000.

This is a 5% decrease from FY '26. However, given the performance of the park millage, DPR has been able to reallocate $2,000,000 in funding for facility and park maintenance agreements, inclusive of pools and custodial services, ensuring zero impact to FY '27 operations. Further, the 2% reduction in benefits brings the FY '27 budget in alignment with the current general fund staffing levels. DPR also received a 2% increase in supplies, which further supports youth team programming and other departmental initiatives. The FY twenty seven proposed budget positions the Department of Parks and Recreation to be in alignment with the mayor's priorities and provides the resources to support ongoing parks maintenance and quality recreational programming for youth, teens, adults, seniors.

So thank you all and I'll pass it back to Commissioner McCuttle.

Great. And, again, this is just another example of all the amazing work the Department of Parks and Recreation does from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to rebrand of the golf course to Love Your Park to where it's seniors, prime time senior programs to the Atlanta Memorial new Atlanta Memorial Park sign, to the Easter egg hunt. There's so much happening in Atlanta Parks and Recreation. So I just wanna give a special shout out to the Department of Parks and Recreation staff, many of whom are behind us. And just really thank you to each of them for showing up every day for giving their all to our community and to really making Atlanta the best place to raise a child. So thank you to them. And now we're happy to take any questions.

Thank you, Commissioner Cutler and team. We're gonna open it up for questions from colleagues starting with Councilmember Hilliard.

Thank you, mister chair. Thank you, commissioner and your team for the presentation. Touched on it some. What accounts for the $2,100,000 deduction in purchasing contractor services? Say again? I believe it was touched on some, but something about reallocating it to the parks improvement fund. But what accounts for the $2,100,000 deduction in purchasing contractor services?

Yeah. So what accounts for that is pools and custodial services. They're directly tied

to parking park maintenance. Fill me in a little bit more on that. Say again? Fill me in a little more on what that is because it's called the parks improvement fund, not the parks maintenance fund. Mhmm. So so fill me in on what that is being used for. Yes.

So it's being Doug, do you wanna talk a little bit about what those

Well, what what what we've actually done in number of cases for the many years is we've used our park operation account to capitalize many of large scale projects. So when we have, for example, a bathhouse renovation, we would use the general fund or we would use whatever fund through operations. Some of those projects should be capitalized or twenty year or more, 100,000, $200,000 projects. And so in those cases, we will use the Park Improvement Fund where they're appropriate. And so in those cases, we've actually ended up in some years with more funds available in the Park Improvement account, and we're basically no no funds remaining or even over in some cases in the general fund.

So what we've done this year, actually, we've already started doing that is whenever there's a project that affects site that would be normally capitalized, we're using where it should be allocated, which is in some cases, millage or the park improvement fund, whichever one you wanna call it.

Okay. Well, I I'll get into more of that in a minute, but I'm I'm sure if there is money left over in the parks improvement fund, I'm sure there's 12 to 15 people that can give you plenty of actual park improvement projects and not just moving maintenance from the general fund where it should be to the parks improvement fund. Well, I think I don't don't get to go home and cut the grass and take out the trash and tell tell my wife that I improved our house. That's just part of the job.

Well, just in terms of the pools, just to be clear, you know, we're talking about full filter replacements. We're talking about roof replacements. We're talking about bathroom fixture replacement. We've done that already at South Bend. We're doing it, I think, at three, four different pools this year already. Some of that is coming out of math, but over historically, there's still a lot of money that's required for pools to keep them operationally safe for for people to use. So I'm not talking about the day to day as much as I'm talking about these larger projects, which we have traditionally used out of our general fund.

And just to add it,

think it

must be really nice to have a recreation center and and a council district and a pool. What what do I need to get one of those? Funded out of the parks improvement fund. Councilman Hillis, think,

CFO Aloha wants to

I think

I just wanna add to that. I think one of the things we think about when we adopted the increase to the park millage is we often cited the $700,000,000 backlog in park maintenance activities and deferred capital maintenance as identified in eight in the activate ATL. So I think it's it's truly appropriate in my opinion, and I believe in our opinion that these go to take care of deferred maintenance. Now they may not look like the thing that your wife is expecting you to do when you when you say you're gonna build a new deck, but it is replacing a dilapidated deck. And if we don't replace that deck, then we don't have a deck.

And so oftentimes, what deputy commissioner Voss, as you mentioned, is we're capitalizing the things that should have been capitalized as opposed to using Park Millage to do maintenance. So we're doing that capital replacement and those capital improvements that we just didn't have resources to do in the past. So you either have a bad asset that is currently failing or or gonna be we're gonna have to tear it down, or we were able to replace that. Some may call that maintenance, but it's truly capital maintenance of those assets.

Okay. What accounts for the 144 position reduction from the general fund? I don't know if there's a slide that says your current account is 3 58 with three twenty seven filled, but FY '26, there were five zero two FTEs. So what accounts for that?

Yeah. Last year in during the budget deliberations, the city council approved a personnel paper which transferred a significant number of positions from the general fund to the Park Milledge.

K. Under one of the big promises when we adopted the Parks Improvement Fund back in for FY '24 back in 2023 was a vast and substantial improvement in parks maintenance. Mhmm. Improving the time frame as when that when that is completed. Yet I have noticed and sent in a lot of issues where there are overflowing trash cans, litter, and city parks. Have you all been able to fulfill that commitment, or are we still working that out?

No. I mean, we've doubled, and really, in some cases, tripled our frequency of visits to our parks, and working with the CEO organization, which allows us both to hire individuals that have been formerly incarcerated, and they're able to take on these tasks and increase litter pickup. Oftentimes, when you see overflowing trash cans, they may be immediately following an event or after an activity, and there is the off chance where we may miss a can. And I think sometimes that occurs. We really try to do our best to hit all cans.

But as you have an off day, we have an off day too sometimes and we try to get every can, but we may still miss a can. And it's helpful when you or other community members let us know that we've missed a can so we can get out there because we have increased our capacity. We're also more consistent when it comes to mowing and to tree trimming. We've also increased the number of forestry and arborist on our arborist stream team, so we're able to address tree takedowns and tree inspections. Really, we've really worked hard to increase both maintenance as well as inspections in those areas. But, unfortunately, sometimes we miss a can, and we do we're really sorry for that.

How much come up touching on the Parks Improvement Fund. How much is currently in the Parks Improvement Fund? How much is of that is currently dedicated to projects or otherwise services? And how much of that Parks Improvement Fund is currently unassigned?

Last report regarding the what's in the oh, you're okay.