City Council - Regular Meeting

We'll be right back. Thank you.

All right. Good morning, everyone. The time is now 10 o'clock on the dot this morning on Thursday, May 19th. Today is day five of a city council's review of the mayor's proposed FY27 municipal budget. I AM JASON WINSTON, CHAIR OF THE FINANCE EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE, AND I'M JOINED BY MY COLLEAGUES, COUNCIL PRESIDENT KALYA OVERSTREET, DOZIER, AND JUAN. OTHER COUNCIL MEMBERS WILL BE CYCLING IN AND OUT TODAY AS WE CONTINUE OUR BRIEFINGS AS THEIR SCHEDULES ALLOW. WE WILL KICK THINGS OFF THIS MORNING WITH THE ATLANTA DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION. uh we will break for lunch and then this afternoon session we will have the department of city planning department of human resources and the department of labor uh and we have also been joined by council member liliana bakhtiari uh for the listening public an electronic copy of the budget book and all presentations can be found under the fy 2027 budget session tab on the finance executive committee web page of the city council website At the completion of each topic, Councilmembers will be able to ask questions. With that, I would ask all leaders from the Atlanta Department of Transportation to please introduce yourself, starting with Commissioner Cavendish.

Good morning, Council. Thank you for the opportunity. My name is Solomon Cavendish, and I am the Commissioner of the Atlanta Department of Transportation.

Good morning, everyone. I'm James Garland. I'm the Assistant Commissioner for Atlanta Department of Transportation.

Good morning, everyone. I'm Wesley Parkman, Deputy Commissioner, Department of Transportation.

Good morning. I'm Renita Jeffries, Chief of Administration.

Good morning, everybody. Allen Smith, Deputy Commissioner for the Maintenance Division.

All right, and we'll get started. Thank you for the opportunity to present. Hope everyone's having a great Election Day. Hopefully that won't add to anxiety throughout the day, but looking forward to a wonderful Tuesday. So the Atlanta Department of Transportation's fiscal year 27 budget presents an exciting opportunity to continue to build upon the progress that the ATL DOT has made in advancing our mission critical operations with funding and staffing. The department's currently managing approximately 53 vacancies across all offices and divisions, reduced from 90 in spring 2025 this time. The proposed fiscal year 27 budget will enable us to further strengthen service delivery and respond more rapidly and reliably to the city's evolving transportation needs. Through thoughtful resource allocation, ATL DOT is reinforcing internal capacity and improving its ability to serve the public more effectively, advancing Mayor Dickens' vision of one safe city, a city of opportunity for all, a city built for the future, and effective and ethical government. These four pillars guide our departmental strategy and budget decisions, ensuring alignment with citywide priorities and community expectations. We've already introduced ourselves, but we are sharing the organizational chart for fiscal 2027. I am the commissioner. We have our assistant commissioner James Garland to my right. We also have assistant commissioner Wesley Parkman, head of our capital delivery program. office we also have miss renita jeffries to my left she is our new chief of administration and alan alan smith who is our deputy commissioner of transportation infrastructure management also in the audience we have our chief of staff miss lisa glover and deputy commissioner lenore bromberg of the office of engineering Okay, now I'll review our accomplishments, fiscal 26. The summary of accomplishments included over the past year shows that we've made substantial progress in improving safety, mobility, and infrastructure across the city. Through strategic investments and dedicated service, our team has delivered impactful results that enhance the daily lives of Atlantans. The summary highlights key accomplishments in safety improvements, infrastructure repairs, capital projects, and emergency response, also to include special events. I'll focus on our Vision Zero program and safety improvements delivered this past year. We recorded seven fewer traffic deaths in calendar year 2025 than the previous year. That includes a 10% reduction in fatal crashes citywide. At this rate of reduction, we're on track to meet our Vision Zero goal of eliminating traffic deaths by 2040. Now, I'll tell you that the 10% reduction exceeds the 7% KPI as part of our Vision Zero plan. So we've exceeded the target, but one death is one too many on our roads. 95 speed limit signs have been installed on our high injury network streets. We've also activated 103 leading pedestrian intervals, double the number of the previous year for pedestrian safety. We have four new school safety action plans through our Safe Routes to Schools program, which is one of the most important programs within the department. I'll move on to our State of Good Repair. We've repaired over 8,000 potholes and over 41,000 linear feet of sidewalk throughout the city. 14 sidewalk locations were done in-house by our maintenance team. We've repaired more than 48,000 potholes during the Dickens administration and have installed or upgraded 609 ADA ramps for improved accessibility. This is three times the installations of ADA ramps from the previous year. We've repaired over 5,500 traffic signals to maintain traffic flow and improve safety with our partners at the Georgia Department of Transportation. Last fiscal year we paved 95 lane miles of roadway. Our ADA self-evaluation was completed in summer 2025 as mandated by the federal consent decree. And the next major milestone includes an ADA transition plan, which is on track for completion within the prescribed timeline of June, 2026. I'll move on to our capital program. We completed 46 capital improvement projects, more than double last year's output, and initiated 11 new projects to enhance safety and infrastructure citywide. Our emergency and special events response includes our snow and weather operations. We treated over 600 miles of roadway and over 400 bridges during the snow and ice events of this year. We supported 286 special and emergency events. We hosted four Atlanta Streets Alive events that promoted open streets and community engagement, and also supported the Peachtrop Comic-Con, one of our specials in the city, major parades, the Atlanta Jazz Fest, and Peachtree Road Race. That does not include all of the activities over in the Sports, Entertainment, and Convention District. What's new and improved? As we look ahead into fiscal 27, our Vision Zero program strategies and planning will focus on eliminating traffic fatalities and serious injuries. We're installing nearly 400 no right turn on red signs, publishing the Vision Zero annual report spotlighting implementation of recommendations. So we have already installed about a quarter of those signs in the downtown and midtown area. So if you're driving downtown, you'll see those and make sure you yield and follow traffic regulations. As mentioned, our Safe Routes to Schools program, we are looking forward to implementation of additional treatments around our schools. And thanks to leadership of Councilmember Hillis, our Fatal Crash Review Commission has yielded great progress as we have worked with the Georgia Department of Transportation to implement safety treatments throughout the city. State of Good Repair, we're completing a $5 million contract to improve service level agreements with our residents to enable proactive maintenance across 658 locations citywide. We awarded a contract for enhanced bike lane and gateway maintenance citywide, so our bike lanes will be cleared, especially as we approach the fall season with all the leaves. We're utilizing new integrated command center to strengthen our partnership with MARTA, the Atlanta Police Department, Atlanta Fire and Rescue, and the Georgia Department of Transportation to strengthen traffic management throughout the city. And with more efficient and timely emergency response, we'll be able to support events throughout the city to include around Piedmont Park, along the Beltline, and obviously for FIFA. We're also planning resurfacing of upwards of 140 miles throughout the city. Our capital investments and delivery include 42 capital improvement projects to be completed in fiscal 27. We're advancing 93 capital improvement projects to construction. We're pursuing over $300 million in total capital improvement program in fiscal 27. And I'll jump over to our special events. So there's a little game being played in Mercedes-Benz Stadium in 2028 that we need to prepare for. So Super Bowl planning will happen during our fiscal 27 period. Atlanta Streets Alive will put on a number of events and continue that very successful program. The SEC College Football Championship is hosted in Mercedes Benz Stadium. So we'll be planning and supporting that event and also events in the SEC District. We have events every other weekend focused in the SEC District. And obviously, FIFA through this summer will be supported by the department. So ATL DOT is actively planning and preparing for these major regional events. These events aren't just regional, but they're national and global. So we want to make sure that all the visitors and residents that come to our city are safe and have a static-free experience. In terms of our strategy and planning, we're developing an ATL DOT's first comprehensive transportation plan. We're gonna set the long-term vision for mobility, safety, equity, and sustainability for Atlanta's transportation network. We're completing five additional Safe Routes to Schools action plans. That is 15 total since fiscal year 25. We're also installing 40 new micro mobility corrals throughout our city. So just jumping over to our recently resurfaced streets, you'll notice that we've resurfaced about 24 streets downtown and citywide given our ARA bond funding and our LMIC funding program. That does not include many of the complete streets and safety projects that we have included resurfacing with through this period. So I'll just call out, we went ahead and paved West Peachtree Street, Payton Road. Shucks, the list goes on Fairburn Road, Edgewood Avenue, Elmwood Drive. The list goes on and on considering what we were able to accomplish this year. So we accomplished 94 miles of roadway paving in fiscal 26. Moving on to upcoming roadways. Shirley Clark Franklin Boulevard will be paved. We have a number of streets out in District 9. We have a number of streets in District 7 and 8. Obviously, we have work soon to come in District 11. District 10 has considerable work on its way and District 6, we're looking forward to kicking off our Monroe Drive safety improvements and all the great work along that south to north corridor. So just considering, we're sharing a summary of the progress of this department. Last year this time, we spoke about all the commitment and all the investment in our capital program. So this chart just gives you an idea of the progress within the department. One sticking point in the past has been the number of project managers that we've had on hand. So we have brought that number up, but we've also brought on a number of consultants to augment the original program that was inherited back in 2023. So you'll notice that the number of projects that we've completed per year has jumped significantly over the last few years. If we go back to the year 2017, we've seen a 150% increase in improvement in our capital program. So we are only accelerating that delivery and look forward to working with each of you. I want to give credit to Council for all the support and the work we've done together in my time here because since 2023, you see an extreme increase extreme progress throughout the city and great work together. So just want to recognize that and thank you all for your contributions. All right, so position counts. We are currently at 553 vacancies of 296. That brings us to an 18% vacancy rate. We are abolishing 10 positions currently and look forward to aligning our staffing to support our function. So there have been a number of changes within the department that have realigned what we've heard from you and from our public, especially from a maintenance standpoint. So we're looking forward to continuing our progress and fiscal 27. And finally, Okay, you'll notice that our budget includes a 4% reduction. However, this budget aligns much of the work that we've done to date, given all the successes of the current year fiscal 27, given the opportunity to take advantage of our enterprise funds and our capital program to augment some of the work we've done. But a great, huge shout out goes out to this group for the Aurobond funding. That Aurobond funding enabled us to address many of the deficiencies in the Atlanta urban redevelopment area. And given that, it saved considerable amount of money to that was used and went into our maintenance funds. So I just want to say thank you for your consideration. Thank you for all your work with us. You see around the city we have newly paved roads. We have safety implementations and deployments and Atlanta is shining. So in summary, All right. In summary, ATL-DOT proudly serves every corner of the city, west, north, east, and south, by delivering meaningful infrastructure improvements and dependable services. Our commitment to equity remains at the heart of everything we do, ensuring that every community benefits from thoughtful investment and enhanced mobility. Through strong engagements with neighborhood planning units and intentional collaboration with residents and stakeholders, we continue to elevate local voices and strengthen community partnerships. Our safety, mobility, and equity data-driven framework guides project prioritization with precision, allowing us to fully understand each community's needs through the lens of equity, safety, and mobility. This approach ensures resources are deployed transparently, effectively to drive measurable improvements for all Atlantans. In fiscal 27, the proposed budget positions ATODOT for an exciting new chapter, one defined by strategic investment, expanded capacity, and strong service delivery. It reflects a balanced, future-focused plan that advances Mayor Dickens' vision for a safe, equitable, and future-ready Atlanta while reinforcing our commitment to responsible stewardship and operational excellence. I want to thank you for the opportunity to present. We look forward to the conversation and your questions. And we will open the floor.

All right. Thank you, Commissioner Kavanagh. And as anticipated, council members have come to with their questions. And so we'll kick things off with Council Member Dozier. Thank you so much, Mr.

Chair, and thank you, Commissioner. Oh, that's a loud microphone. I'm going to not talk super loud into this thing. It's good to see you all, as always. First, I just want to open with a quick comment. With the year-over-year project delivery growth slide that you had, my only comment is Let me back that up. The project delivery growth slide, I would love to see those numbers on a year-over-year basis. One thing I'm concerned about, just as we bucket those years in the way that y'all did, is that that first bucket included those first couple years of COVID, and there wasn't a lot of project delivery happening regardless. So we have an apples-to-apples comparison. We'd love to know what we're doing in 2017, 2018, 2019 versus what we're doing today to kind of see what our change has been. I did have a question about our general fund allocations for traffic calming. And what's our current backlog? I know there's a large backlog, but just kind of, if you'll have a number so I can share with my constituents. So when you're asking, hey, where's my dang speed humps? I can give them a heads up on what that's looking like across the board.

Yeah, thank you for that question, Councilmember. So we'll get the numbers per district to this group. However, our traffic calming bucket is included in our capital delivery program. So some of what traditionally has been asked by our maintenance forces, we can use those capital funds to fund some of the traffic calming measures. So we've already started that process. We have a list of on-call contractors that we can access and you'll start seeing much faster delivery along corridors.

So there's no general fund allocation for traffic calming that's coming from one of

I'm sorry. Yes, there is always within our other uses and our maintenance funds, but we're taking advantage of the traffic calming within our Moving Atlanta Forward program to augment those. And what's the general fund allocation for that? The total funding allocation for $10 million. $10 million. And so...

And I recognize that costs for delivering these projects are getting more and more every year. I think my first show on council, I think the math worked out to where it was like $6,000 or $7,000 per speed hump. And today is like $11,000 or $12,000. So I recognize that. You know, we're allocating more money for these types of projects, but they're more and more expensive. To that end, I know back in 2022, we adopted Moving Atlanta Forward, nearly $500 million were allocated for transportation projects for that. Are we thinking that we'll need to identify additional funding or revenue sources to complete that project list, recognizing inflation, tariffs, labor costs? Those contingencies that we baked into that initial project list may not necessarily be enough to allow us to deliver on those projects as anticipated.

So what we're finding in our delivery of the projects we have completed, we found some savings. We've also found that the scopes that were originally constructed did not match the real world conditions when we got into design. So we're able to find a number of cost savings in our program. And because of the speed of getting our scopes straight to construction, we're able to get projects out much faster. So we can do a time comparison in terms of our forecast spending for the capital program and work with finance. We've already started that conversation with transportation chair, but that's something that this department is truly focused on.

And I would love to sit down with you and the team to look at, and not just in my district, but comprehensively where we're at with those Moving Atlanta Forward projects. district specific. I know the department identified the interchange at I-20, MLK, and Westlake as one of the most dangerous interchange for pedestrians in the city. But there hasn't been any movement on, you know, where are we at on design or where are we at on construction? When are we gonna have our first community meeting about what that redesign looks like? But then separately, I'm getting a lot of questions about corridors that are no longer in my district, but impact people in my community, whether it's Camelton Road, Cascade, Phase 2, and others. And so, you know, I would love to get a sense of where we're at with those, especially with those projects that, when you look at the Moving Atlanta Forward list, that we're at the top of the list because they're so high priority, because they're in a high injury network, and just the impact will be tremendous for our community. So we'll love to sit down with you and the team and recognize them on the Transportation Committee. So I'll defer to the Transportation Chair to make sure I'm not getting into his Kool-Aid too much, but It impacts all of us and so it'll be nice to know where we're at on those projects. Absolutely. On that on a similar note for capital projects that aren't included in one of those buckets like moving Atlanta forward I'm gonna go back to our conversation about Peachtree Street or the Peachtree crossing one when those project opportunities or needs come up, are those general fund allocations or are we pulling from a separate capital fund for those safety improvements? And then number two, just specific to that project, do we have a timeline on when we can expect to see a safe crossing? World Cup's coming in a few weeks, and I would love to make sure that visitors from Cabo Verde and Uzbekistan can get to their hotels and get to the MARTA station and order some Chick-fil-A in a very safe way. So, any update on that?

Yeah, so yes, the Peachtree program does include capital funding. Also, that funding has been tied to some of the stitch design so that design work is ongoing along the entire downtown network as it relates to the stitch. The crossing is a sticking point because there was an incident not too long ago and there's litigation involved in that. So what we're doing is looking get treatments that can potentially channel and designs that support moving folks, especially this summer. And we can follow up with you, but it's one of those hairy situations relative to litigation. But we obviously want the best and safest corridor possible considering what Peachtree represents to us. So we'll follow up with you in terms of the status.

And I'm gonna just push back a little bit on the litigation piece because I recognize that that's happening, but the design work, the ongoing, the conversations that we've been having around construction, around reestablishing a safe crossing, to me, separate from the litigation piece. We can have a conversation but my view is that they're separate things that yes there's spatially this took place in the same location but the need for a safe crossing there doesn't preclude the litigation doesn't preclude our ability to discuss the capital improvements that we're making to make that crossing safer. That's going to stick with me for a little bit, because I do want to get resolution on that, especially since we've done two resolutions now as a council. I recognize resolutions aren't legally binding, but the intent is to try to move this project as quickly as we can. And we've missed both those deadlines. And we'll continue to have heartburn over that. Mr. Chair, I'll yield for now. I'll imagine I'll have more questions. All right. Thank you. Council Member Norwood.

Good morning. Good morning. I think I heard right that you said we are addressing northeast, west, and south. I'm northwest. I'm the one that's left out. So we know that I have a tremendous amount of commuter traffic. Y'all have y'all paved Moore's Mill thanks to the governor's wife who explained that she wanted Moore's Mill paved. So I'm very glad that Moore's Mill got paved. Thank you, Marty Kemp. Secondly, I am seeing on this list half of Habersham, which my street has 15,000 cars, So it's nice to have three or four blocks of that paved and part of Peachtree Battle. But I have a lot of streets that have suffocating traffic, bad conditions. And in my part of the city, there's not a lot we ask for. There just isn't. But what we do need is our streets in good repair. We have the commuter traffic. We have only residential. The only commercial that is even in District 8 is at OK Cafe at Northside Parkway and Roswell Road on the eastern side. That's it. Everything else is homeowners with streets that are falling apart. We know that last week we had the worst pothole hotspots in the entire city. So when we were all asked for our budget request, my first one was streets. So I'm here today saying please help. Now, we have impact fees, we have congestion pricing. Several years ago, I wanted to have transportation much more specific than north and south and west. I wanted to have transportation. Where is the traffic? Where are the real issues? Where do we really need to address this? um and so we've paved 94 streets at 94 miles of streets and as you know i've run citywide half a dozen times i know every street and i really appreciate all my colleagues getting streets so this is not i get them and you don't it's that we We are in an environment where we are producing a lot of the traffic because Cobb County comes through us. We know we have the whole 75 versus 400 issue. So we really do, and I appreciate West Paces Ferry that you did. As you know, when we all did Moving Atlanta Forward, most of the city asked for complete streets. My district, before I was here, only asked for resurfacing. So you did resurface. I understand that. But we weren't even looking for complete streets. So when you start looking at the big MAF budget, you didn't have a ton of money that was spent in district aid. What you need to do is come out, resurface the streets. You did that. That was great. So I am very grateful. But I would like to get with y'all and figure out how we get state of good repair. on a district that has a tremendous amount of traffic and a tremendous amount of degradation not just on the main streets but but throughout the entire district and y'all gotten some pictures so i look forward this budget cycle let's go from pictures to timeline if you will please and that's it thank you council member all right thank you council member martin

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair, and to you, Commissioner Kavis and your team. Thank you all for being here this morning and sharing what your outlook will be for the upcoming fiscal year. As you know, we have completed, pun intended, the complete streets at Cascade. I think there are a few kind of punch items that are left. I would like to know Is that on your radar? Because it's been a while since we talked about it, Commissioner. And kind of where we are with making sure that those punch-out items like these benches, trash cans, my predecessor, Madam President, can keep me honest, no? Yes, no, maybe so. Yeah, I don't read this well, but let me know if there's an update on that. That was just a really big undertaking for the district. Caused a lot of consternation, as you know, but we got it done. Finally, a little disappointed that the GDOT did not better coordinate. I heard that folks were taken. I had graduations over the weekend, so I was out of the district mostly. But folks were taken and using Cascade as a as a detour route. But, you know, full 18 wheeler trucks. And so just any insight you can share on that, you know, please.

Yeah. Thank you. I'm going to pass it on to along to our DC Parkman as it relates to the status of all the work we're doing in terms of punch lists along Cascade.

Thank you for your question. We actually are in the process of addressing a lot of those detour streets. We actually did a ride along with some people from the community members last month and identified some of the issues and problems. We've already started resurfacing four of the detour streets that were out there just already in the process of doing that. We have two more children in Adams who are about to get started in the next two weeks. Get those detour streets resurfaced. In addition to that, we've identified other punch item lists that some of the community members identified as having their concerns, i.e. there was trash left in people's yards, actually some meters that were that were compromised, as well as some of the Turner Radius. We're actually about to hydroblast Cascade and Clearbrook to kind of make a better Turner Radius out of that subdivision, so get people a better view turning out of that. We did hear about some accidents that happened in the vicinity, so we're addressing those.

I appreciate that. Hydroblasting is exactly what it sounds like, the high-pressure water used to blast away concrete, I presume?

Yes, it's kind of what that does. It takes away the existing lines in the center lines. So we're going to move those over five feet.

Got it.

So we get better turn radius. So when people turn out, they're not making such a sharp turn radius. Got you. Turn that, move it over, and we'll move in the existing right-of-way for better turn.

And the trim items, the, you know, I think trash cans, benches, those kinds of things, are we on the same? I understand that they were part of the plan, but some of them have not been installed. Is there a plan for that?

Yes, we're addressing the rest of the maintenance teams about certain issues that we find out there.

Okay. Let's certainly stay in coordination on that. I really appreciate the update and really, really excited about Childress and Adams. Folks use them as detour routes, I myself included, when Cascade was offline. And so, you know, particularly Adams when there are, I think there are 20 homes on the entire street. their car traffic probably increased you know a hundred times during the construction period and so I'm really really glad that we can report out to those residents over there that's going to be taking place and commencing in the next two weeks. Please call Dr. Walter Young, Commissioner Kavits, and let him know that President Overstreet and I asked you to reach out to him because he's gonna be really excited about both of those. My final question is about our sidewalks that are coming to Beecher. Commissioner and I had a brief conversation. We didn't quite have a timeline scoped yet. That's a long, long standing project. I believe I was working not for Matt, but I think I was working for Cesar Mitchell at the time. We started that project like almost 20 years ago. Is there a timeline, a commencement date that we can begin to socialize with the community about those sidewalks on Beecher coming?

Yes, Councilmember. We would like to reach out about setting the next meeting with the community to share the timeline, share the phasing of the work. We're much closer. We decided to do a design-build approach, so we'll be reaching out for scheduling that immediately with your community.

Fantastic. Let's please coordinate on that. It's going to be an amazing addition to the community because it features, as you know, feeds right into the Cascade Heights Commercial District, which is becoming really a little cultural, you know, kind of entertainment hub in southwest Atlanta. And I think that making it more walkable is only going to increase the prospects for that area to continue to grow and thrive. So I really appreciate it. And I think that what we as we prioritize and think about Southwest Atlanta, you know, through the lens of of of Campbellton, you know, Commissioner, let's please also stay in touch about Greenbrier Parkway. I know we've been trying to coordinate on that. The community had some. plans and input I think it's time to update them again because I think you all are ready soon to really start the I think it's the restriping of that and so that is all I have Mr. chair I appreciate you and thank you all again for being here all right thank you thank you uh council member one um thank you Mr. chair and thank you commissioner and team um appreciate the presentation I want to start off I'm going to try and keep all of this very broad stroke I want to start off with

The decrease in your budget allocation for year over year, the description, I can't say is particularly enlightening. It says reflects adjustments, personnel, I'm going to start there, reflects adjustments and reallocation of personnel to align staffing levels with operational needs. Can you illuminate that a little better for me?

Yes, thank you for the question, Councilmember and Chair of the Transportation Committee. So the original budget, if you notice back in our actuals in 2025, were taken at a point back in February of 2025. So if we think thereabouts over a year ago, We tried to balance our operational needs with our staffing and what we found going into fiscal 26 is that many of the positions and the roles didn't align with the direction department is going. So I'll give you an example. We included or We're just getting our Office of Engineering going, and we've brought a number of in-house designs into the Office of Engineering. That has led to an accelerated late of delivery. I'll jump to our maintenance programming. The alignment for the type of work that we're doing and the emergency response and our SLAs were less aligned back in February 25. But we've come to find out that we need to rebuild. And what we're in the process of doing is rebuilding that frontline workforce to address our SLAs, couple that with the enterprise funds for our capital improvements. So if you think about the work we do with sidewalks, all the paving we've done to address potholes along corridors, primary and secondary routes, that alignment of our staffing has shifted since that time. So when we had our 25 actuals, they were a bit inflated, so we made an adjustment in fiscal 26. There are a number of extra helps that we have filled, and we have filled some of our incumbents with staff, which has brought our, we filled the higher salary vacancies with the incumbents. So we were able to eliminate a number of positions. So that gave us a bit of a surplus in that regard. So what we found in this proposal is matching our 25, we are actually exceeding where we were going into fiscal 26. Okay.

I'm going to digest that, but a lot of what you said, I wrote down the word rebuild because I feel like that is, that's jumped out at me. I want to pivot a little bit to SLAs. I've been harping on that with you quite a bit since the beginning of the year. And even in the budget book, the SLAs that are here, we're anticipating in FY27 numbers that are less than what we did in 24 and 25. And so while I understand that you want to reset and recalibrate a lot of the SLAs, I think I pointed out at the last Transportation Committee, even if we look year on year, we're slipping in the wrong direction. Trends are moving backwards. No matter what the goalpost line is, we're moving away from it versus towards it. So it doesn't make sense to me that we are now pulling back additional resources from you when what we would measure your department's performance by, we're not getting where we need to. And you said yourself it is about trying to rebuild and recalibrate. From the SLA angle, can you help me get more comfortable with this notion of cutting your budget back when we're trying to, we really should be putting foot on the gas?

I see Deputy Commissioner Alan Smith leaning in, so I'll let him speak to our SLAs, and then I'll circle back.

Thank you for that question, Council Member 1. So with regards to SLAs, going into the next fiscal year, we're really going to be looking at a few approaches to how we address those. One thing that we did this year was really have our internal team focus on emergency requests, things that are very critical, things like emergency traffic signals, emergency signage. Because we have the in-house capability to do that and get out there fast and get these things resolved. So for example, during this fiscal year, we had a 95% reduction in our overall backlog of emergency traffic signals. We had a 96% reduction in our overall backlog of emergency sign repair. and a 62% reduction in our non-emergency traffic signals. One thing to note is I know we have been discussing the SLA metric. One of the things that we noticed and we're working with 311 is that some of our request types are getting requests that don't match the criteria. So for example, if you think about emergency signal repair, sometimes based on the requests that come in, they aren't actually emergencies. And so it's really stretching out and making our SLAs for that particular bucket look a lot worse than they are. One of the things that we've done is we've gone through an exercise to identify where those pain points are. We're working with 311 to create specific requests that actually capture the needs. So we will have a critical bucket for things like emergency repairs, but then also a bucket for urgent things, but they're more stabilized. And they'll probably have a longer SLA. So that's one thing. The other thing is that The commissioner had spoken about this earlier. We've started putting out task orders through contract forces to help us with some of the items that are a little bit more complex in nature, that take a little bit more time and resources. Right now, we will be completing a $5 million task order by September of this year that will help us get the backlog down. And then also we're working with 311 to really help clean up the duplicates that are in the system. I know we have a relatively new work order management system. We're going through some refinement with 311 with that. So by the end of FY27, we will see in our core maintenance categories across signals, signs, markings, point repairs, and sidewalks about a 41% reduction in the backlog by the end of FY27.

So, Councilmember, if I may, you spoke about SLAs. Just recognizing that SLAs focuses more on timeliness of addressing call-ins and deficiencies, and some of what you're hearing and some of what we've experienced is It's not a matter of addressing the deficiencies, it's how we're tagged in terms of our timeliness in addressing those deficiencies. And that realignment related to timeliness, we need a very strong focus on to make sure that alignment is there because it really makes us look bad given all the work and all the effort that we've done and the investment when the SLAs are the only measure for what we're being judged by. We received and acknowledged the SLA challenge. We are working with Commissioner Good on improving those. However, the volume of pure work that's getting done and the change, especially since when I got here in 2023, has been substantial, but we received.

I'm not questioning the progress. What I'm questioning is the resourcing. And while I understand the challenges and the criticisms you have about the SLA process, Great. I mean, I think one narrative would be, okay, well, then let's move the goalpost. But I'm like, okay, let's discount that. Let's look over period, over period, year over year, because that measurement technique is the same. So while it may not be the absolute, I need to get to 10, it's the relative movement that I'm looking at. And if we're not even making progress in that direction, then I get concerned, like, do we need to add resources? The other piece that I'm trying to get my head around, too, is, Mr. Smith, you talked about wanting to bring a lot of this in-house, but your budget request does not reflect that. I want to go in a little bit more on the staffing level. First off, I just need someone to help me reconcile how we're going from the FY26 adopted of 426 FTEs down to 296. And so this is the problem of not having a midyear personnel paper is that we're stuck with that starting point from last June. We didn't get a chance to reset that to accurately half year and now we're seeing this big jump. So who can help me reconcile that big difference? And then I want to go and talk about what you're projecting for FY27.

So the personnel paper and the mid-year paper, to your point, Provided or did not provide us an opportunity to explain some of the adjustments that we've made So I spoke about alignment of the department and our function what we Have been able to do is look at the number of positions and position titles that have been on the books for over six years, over three years, over four years, and identify if those were appropriate for the department and what our needs are. As we go into 27, you'll find that realignment and re, I guess, classification of positions will get us down to a vacancy rate just over 5%. And while we're doing that, we have at least 13 frontline worker positions that we're recruiting currently. We also have extra helps that are filling those roles that were misaligned. And as we go into 27, this budget will support where we need to be in terms of our resources and what we've heard from council relative to our slas our maintenance and frontline workers okay you can see on my face that that's not i'm still confused because we're going from 425 ftes to 296 that is a 30 reduction in your ftes

When you present on page eight, you should start counseling. You mentioned four. Could you repeat those numbers? FY26 adopted budget in the page 471 of our budget book 425.65 FTEs and we we drop that dramatically down to 296.2 for FY27. So I have no idea how we got there and that even from your slide eight that still accounts for 53% 53 vacant positions. You say that you're only going to abolish 10 positions in the personnel paper. Those numbers are, I can't make those align in my head. So I'm hoping one of y'all can help me get from.

So chairman, I'm sorry, this is Yolanda. I wanted to chime in just to provide additional information. So during the year, some of those positions were, as the commissioner mentioned, to realign. Some of those are in TSPLAS, moving Atlanta forward, and also other capital funds. So we wanted to share that. In addition, there are some abolishments. So when you look at it in total, when we ended the year, last year for FY25, we did a lot of reclasses. to make sure that we move those positions over and so when you get the personnel paper you should see some of that but again what we're seeing here is just the realignment to the capital projects for the work that the commissioner spoke about a moment ago you just walked right into my last question and that has to do with

cap the capital funds and this shifting of people over there and so yeah I do want more detail on that because it seems to be a pervasive habit of moving things out of the general fund to place in fund out of these other funds that we have I'm not disputing some of that is appropriate but I I NEED MORE INFORMATION ON THAT BECAUSE IT APPEARS THAT WE'RE MOVING 30% OF TRANSPORTATION STAFF. LET'S JUST ASSUME ALL OF THEM ARE GOING OVER, HAVE BEEN RECLASSIFIED. THAT'S SIGNIFICANT. AND IT'S NOT LIKE, EXCEPT FOR AURA, IT'S NOT LIKE THESE CAPITAL FUNDS WERE APPEARED OVER THE LAST, DURING THIS LAST FISCAL YEAR. THEY'VE BEEN IN FOR A LONG TIME. SO IT WAS A VERY INTENTIONAL DECISION THIS YEAR TO MOVE THEM OVER. And what I worry about is that when those sunset and when we finish, if we ever finish some of them, I'll be honest with you.

I'm sorry, Councilmember, we absolutely will and we are. So I just want to make sure that's clear. I'm sorry to interrupt you.

I'm being facetious. But when those sunset and let's presume that we don't necessarily have something to dovetail that in terms of the next T-splast. I worry that we won't have an accurate reflection of what your department should be how big it should be just for the general maintenance potholes sign repairs all those great SLA care categories that shouldn't be in a capital fund that really should be in your department so. that's why this is i i'm having a lot of um just dissonance with your budget request for all these reasons and i'm going to need a lot of help between now and when we are expected to vote on this budget to get me there so i think step one is let's let's see how that personnel paper looks it's unfortunate that we're getting on getting that on the last day of budget hearings in the very last session um because there's there are a lot of questions that i think we all have about general fund over to capital funds or trust funds. I still assert that we are not appropriately funding your department for just the year-in, year-out operational maintenance stuff. And I base that on whether we agree on what the absolute numbers are on the SLAs are, we can, I think, at least agree, because that's what the data shows, that we're not moving in the right direction with that. So to me, the answer is potentially additional resources. And then finally, going back to the capital funds conversation, We should be approaching the sunset of many of those programs. Moving Atlanta forward, next year is going to be year five. And as I understood from the bond, what we heard, like the bondholders are expecting significant progress movement encumbrance by year five. That's next year. Aura was always expected just to be a one-year program. So that one should be gone. I know that there's some tail end stuff that we're going to push into FY27. We're new Atlanta. We are now 11 years in. We're going to be 12 years in. We got to close that out, too. So again, we should be at the end of these things. So these, I feel like, are the appropriate conversations we're supposed to be having about your department, what the operation model is, and how we look at what your run rate needs to be. And I just don't feel like this budget reflects that. getting in that direction. So I'll look forward to more of the data. Obviously, we're going to continue this conversation in the Transportation Committee, but I just felt like I needed to put all that out there today with your budget hearing request. Mr. Chair, I yield. Thank you. Thank you.

Next, we have Councilmember Amos followed by Bond.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. First of all, let me start by saying thank you to you and all of your team. I see some very familiar faces out there. I wish Carla Smith was here because she has really been a godsend on moving projects forward. So if you're listening, thank you to you as well. Every question I have is tied back to this budget. I'm going to stick for a minute where my colleague was, Council Member Juan, just to get some further clarification. FY24, you had an FTE of 374. 25, you had an FTE of 376. Two, three more people than the previous year. And that is the year you said you was bloated and you was inflated, those words you used. And at FY26, you made an adjustment. But the adjustment would have went from FY25 where you say you was inflated at 376 to FY26, 425. So if you're inflated at 25, you were definitely inflated in FY26. And if you made an adjustment, for FY27, and like you said, it was almost 30%. If the year that you was definitely inflated and all of the projects was moving, what should we expect from your department in FY27 when you just cut it by 30%?

Thank you for the question, Councilmember. I think what we heard is inflated and delivery. And much of the conversation we just had was we've moved considerable resources over to capital. The three plus years I've been sitting here, I've been pressured to deliver. We've made sure that we reappropriated resources for delivery. I'm getting a bit beat up about some of those actions. However, the results speak for themselves. We are sunsetting. We are moving the program. We are accelerating. However, the realignment that's happened over the last two years has enabled some of that. Now that we're on the other side, the adjustments and the alignment have brought us back down to something a bit more reflective of what works. To your point, it looks different, but we've taken much of that capital work and charged against it because that's where the majority of the effort has been. But I receive your point about 30% and the concerns. And I think there's an education opportunity here to share with council some of our internal operations.

And thank you. And make no mistake about it. Your department has been very good to District 3. You have done some great work. So this exercise here is like steel sharpening steel. So I hope we can keep moving. Where in the budget will... We can do a better job of coordinating services. We go out, we spend money to pave roads, and then either our contractors, or even worse, our own departments go out and tear up the work that we just completed. Where in this budget address coordination of services?

So we're taking advantage of... software opportunities to do work smarter across the enterprise. So if you think about the whole of the government with Commissioner Eyerly and Commissioner Turner, we have built a relationship where we recognize timing, planning, working together, especially at our deputy commissioner level, makes a difference. So we're working with our support and AIM and others to think about how we better coordinate. This year was very unique given the accelerated work throughout the city. Utilities were not ready for how fast we're moving and the amount of work that we need to get done. We currently sit on the Fulton County Utilities Commission. We include all of our cross departments, including watershed, public works. We have monthly meetings to discuss where we are, our timing. We have a moratorium coming up, so they better restore everything in time for June. But to your point, we recognize the opportunity, and we're internally working and thinking about smarter ways of doing coordination. And obviously Boone is a great example, Josephine Boone. We have other examples and we've learned a lot during this process. So we appreciate that comment. Thank you for bringing it up so I wouldn't have to.

The Safe Railroad crossing, I remember we applied and received that grant a couple of years ago. Glad to see that it is about to happen. What will be priority given because, you know, personally speaking, I have one railroad track that at any given time can block Chapel, Boone, and Mason-Turner. So any type of priorities will be given to those type of crossings that exist in pretty much a quarter of a mile each other.

Yeah, appreciate that. We will be reaching out in the very near future as we're kicking off the grant and looking at those hot spots to include, you know, McDonough, South Side, the West Side, and the areas plagued by these crossing issues. So we'll be reaching out in very near future.

I don't see my colleague Hillis here, so I changed my hat to District 9 and 3. Where in this budget that'll finally get the West Marietta Street Bridge done?

Listen, I am not passing the buck, but we are pounding on the railroad's door for our permits. We've been ready since the last time we met, and we've gotten as much work as we could and even temporary measures in place to address West Marietta. But y'all will be the first to know, and I will reach out to Councilmember Hillis to see if he can also support us in getting pressure on railroads to get that moving.

Please let us know. What is the current number of project managers and how many will be added in this FY27? I'll leave that to D.C. Park.

Currently, we have a total of 26 project managers. We have 10 in-house as far as project managers on ATO staff. We have two GS consultants as well as our PMT teams. They have additional project managers, which brings us to a total of 26 project managers at this time.

Are we adding any more in 27 or...

Whereas right now we're sitting where we're at with that 26 numbers. But we're looking, we do have the ability with the PMT team to bring out additional project managers at any time. So that is in the PMTs when they need, we bring them in at that time as needed.

Thank you. I do know there was a conversation probably about a year, year and a half ago about how do we organize project managers to ensure that there was one for each zone of the city or one for each council district in the city, whatever happened to that idea?

much of what you mentioned has to do with our maintenance programming. And we have established five zones within the city and distributed staffing within those five zones to focus on maintenance activities. So that includes our inspectors as well. So that program is accelerated. We'll be working with council member Juan to report out on how that's coming along, but this budget supports that approach. and you know quote council member juan you walk right into my next question where in this budget address general maintenance of sidewalks and roads yes so our capital budget includes sidewalks and road maintenance it's the more we do with resurfacing the more we address some of the deficiencies along the roadways so we've to transportation committee's recommendation focused many of our resources on resurfacing throughout the city. We also are designating considerable funding in our maintenance in this budget for concrete work, sidewalks, and another happy announcement, we have accelerated our moving land forward sidewalk work and sidewalk maintenance. We just finished $25 million worth of work and are investing additional dollars in our on-call services. So if you have not seen folks out on the sidewalks replacing ADA ramps and patching sidewalks, then let me know because it is happening.

Thank you. I'm sorry, but I'm glad I'm here with some people more intelligent than me. The only thing I see in the budget that says anything about capital, you're actually cutting by $34,000. So show me the law item that you're referring to. What is it called in the budget book?

Yeah, so that is as part of our TSPLOS II and our bond funding. We have... $20-plus million worth of sidewalk improvement work. We've transposed that on top of our 311 and our maintenance work so that we can be smart about how we spend that money so that we can open up our maintenance funds and maintenance priorities for areas that are in immediate need and especially emergency situations. I'll just add that the other transportation or other financial uses is consistent with those needs. And given, quite frankly, given our bond and our capital work, it has really opened up funding within our general fund to address our maintenance.

And just to add, the capital projects start on page 507.

That's what I needed. Thank you. Thank you. What is the status of Renew Allowsome?

So Renew Atlanta is approaching 87% completion. We really need support from council to appropriate your discretionary funds so we're going to be working with transportation chair to make sure that we get those funds designated so we can spin those down and close out Renew. But we have contractors, and we have some exciting work that have been on the books for quite a while, to include Monroe, just on the other side of April.

Excuse me, June. So with that comment, I'm hearing we're about 90% complete and the other 10% we own up here. Yes, sir. Do you want to make it clear? There's some work we have to finish. okay um and then last but not well two more questions um i know we used to speak of a contract to where we would be using several people to move projects forward is that why we was able to get stuff out the door this year are we utilizing that contract what is the status of that contract yes much of it's a maintenance contract and we were able to address a lot of the backlog much of the backlog that we had on the books as part of our slas and we are

40% complete and it should be completed this September.

So the project is still, I mean, the contract is still being enforced and we don't need to renew or anything. I think that is it. Mr. Chair, I yield. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Council Member Bond.

Yeah, thank you, guys. First, I want to say thank you for the Cortland bike lane because my trip to City Hall is much safer now. And most of my questions have been asked already. I had a few about staffing. And I just wanted to make sure I got it correctly. You all have 26 project managers currently. And how many of those are in-house?

There's 10 in-house project managers, but like I said, we can bring them on additional project managers at any time. For example, even we had a situation where we needed additional support for Arborist, and we utilize our PMT to bring someone in-house to bring them into the team to coordinate with the other departments. So we need additional project managers at any time where you could use the PMT team to bring additional people on.

Okay. And how much is that up from the last few previous years?

So, Three years ago, we were down at 17. We brought in the bulk of those project managers to sit in a year later to show that we were staffing up and taking advantage of our contract services. So we were at 23 and the goal has always been to be at 27. What we found with the closing out of projects or the attrition associated with the need We've had less projects per project manager, so we've become much more efficient. And let me tell you, everyone at this table is a project manager, so if you want to add five to that number. But we have increased our productivity and our project managers within the department.

OK, that's good to hear. And I had a follow up question that I don't remember. Oh, you all mentioned sweeping bike lanes. And I'm selfishly interested in what that looks like and what we're doing differently.

I'm sorry, I missed the first part of the question.

Oh, sweeping bike lanes.

Yes. Don't look at me. I'm going to leave that to Deputy Commissioner Smith because he took full initiative on making sure we address the bike lanes. So please.

Yes, so Councilmember Bunn, we have, like the Commissioner said earlier, we have an annual contract that will be awarded soon, probably within the next 30 days, that will encompass the weekly cleaning of our protected bike lanes. DPW does handle the areas that have no protection on them because they can reach them with their sweepers. In the meantime, we did start yesterday, actually. We used a small purchase order to get a contractor out there to start until that contract goes live.

Cool.

That's great to hear. I think those are all my questions.

Thank you. Council Member Bakhtiari.

thank you um first and foremost i want to uh say acknowledge like that you all have done a lot of work in the district um the repavings a lot of the traffic calming projects and things that we've been working for a long time to get across the finish line uh we have we've made a lot of progress still more to go but definitely wanted to say thank you to your team Thank you, Commissioner DC Smith, for always being available. DC Bromberg, the rest of the team. John Saxton, who is far too tall for that chair he's sitting in. And I just wanted to thank you all for that because, first and foremost, because there is a lot to go into. I wanted to ask, I mean, There's been a lot of questions covering the breadth of all operations, but I think the biggest one of all in the broadest question that has not been asked is. What is our transit vision because we've talked a lot about the realignment of personnel and all of those things to go with the direction of the department, but what I asked you what is that direction and what is what is the vision.

Yes, so the vision has always been safety and making sure that we provide the safest travel for all of our tourists, visitors, residents, and the community. We also have been charged with delivering on safety, so our priority is to design, deliver, and maintain our infrastructure to support people moving safely from point A to point B. So our programming is lined with safety, delivery and maintenance. Now, over the past few years we've been working with our partners to include gdot and MARTA especially as part of more MARTA to deliver or augment people getting from point a to point b within the region so we've added to our programming obviously the rapid a line has gone live the first delivery of a more MARTA program gdot we're coordinating traffic management and traffic operations now within the department But going back to our first priority is safety. And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention customer service. So shout out to Carla Smith for her leadership and all that she does for customer service and all the team.

Carla, if you're listening, you're not supposed to work past 9 p.m. And you need to be drinking water and feeding yourself. But I'm happy to... I appreciate the answer. And I appreciate what you're saying about safety. One of the reasons I bring up with the vision is because I think the greatest, as we're talking about equity, as we're talking about these things around the city, to me, the greatest threat to equity in the city of Atlanta is transit. We don't have yet the connectivity. We do not have alternative transit options. And I honestly do not know what the vision for that is, which is why I consistently ask about it. And I understand the safety piece. But to me, achieving that safety means what are the details in the vision? And so connectivity, as I said, remains a massive issue in the city. You know this, especially in underserved communities. We know that our congressional district has a second highest number of fatalities in the country, pedestrian and bicycling fatalities. So not council district, congressional district five. And which is, as we know, the city. So can you explain about how We are getting that connectivity done in undershirt communities. I'm getting complaints constantly about sidewalks. So that has to pale in comparison to my other colleagues because the east side is well connected compared to other parts of the city. So how are we deploying our staff to repair and maintain pedestrian access in this level of safety? How is that? How are we deploying folks? How are we making that happen?

So I'll start recognizing that much of our capital program is sidewalks and access, reasonable walking and connectivity. So the acceleration of our capital program has spoken to all the work that we've been doing to repair, replace and install new sidewalks. One of the numbers we presented was ADA ramps. So we have In just this past year installed in the years not over fiscal 26 installed 600 plus ATA ramps throughout the city years prior. We only installed about 195 200 ATA ramps throughout the city and that's only accelerating with our bond and a number of projects that are corridor projects that are oncoming and of access to transit. So the transit that does exist, MARTA has an access to transit program that we work with them for access and sidewalks and crossings. Our Vision Zero and safety record speaks volumes considering we are almost 50% reduction in fatalities since 2021 at the height of the fatalities that we saw in the city. That number is trending down. We are beating our KPIs and targets in terms of fatalities. However, there's so much more work that we can do with our regional partners. The Fatal Crash Commission has been a huge success relative to addressing individual fatalities and investigating with APD, with GDOT. So just speaking to the creation of ATL DOT seven years ago last week. We just celebrated our seven year birthday. Happy birthday. And if you compare our record to where the city was before the creation of an ATL DOT, I think you'll find that working with city council and that focus and focused investment on safety and infrastructure has gone a long way.

Thank you. And you mentioned the connectivity piece, you mentioned bike lanes, you mentioned the Oregon But we've had an issue with the bike lane, that we had an issue with the Oribons and the bike lanes not being installed on roads that fit into that overall connectivity vision. And so we have roads that have been repaved throughout my district. You have a lot of repavings that have taken place, but the bike lanes have not been installed. But we know it's funded through the Oribons. So what is happening there? Why is that not being completed?

So much of it, and I've spoken in the past, has to do with timing. So our Moving Atlanta Forward corridor implementations require a very involved, detailed process for community engagement and making sure our designs match what the community wants relative to bike lanes and reconfiguring the roads. It's not just... popping a bike lane in we have to make sure um roadway conditions the pitch the um or rather the drainage everything is uh as per design so what we found with some of the roads that we've paved in town uh especially within the aura district some of those designs aren't where they need to be for us to build out a full corridor implementation. However, we've tried to augment that with bike lanes until we get to that point. So example is Courtland Street. We were going in. We knew that there needed to be connectivity. We went ahead and installed the bike lanes from Ellis all the way to connect with the Washington Street Bridge. We've also installed We've reinstalled some of the lanes on Edgewood. We've extended that all the way to Inman Park. There are many examples. So in the last two years, we've installed about 10 miles of bike lanes. Any way possible, we want to make sure that we consider all modes of transportation and that connectivity. So it's not as though there's an effort not to address Many of the folks you see in this room are avid bikers, but we need to make sure that we accommodate all modes, but we have to do it the right way.

I WANT TO ALSO, I WANT TO GO BACK TO SOMETHING THAT COUNCILMAN VAUGHN BROUGHT UP WHICH WAS THE 30%, I BELIEVE 30% LOSS OR REDUCTION IN FTE'S AND THAT WE HEARD MS. CARR TALK ABOUT HOW THAT WAS BECAUSE THERE WAS A SHIFTING OVER TO CAPITAL. IS THAT CORRECT? CAPITAL DELIVERY? SO I SUPPOSE I'm confused. Well, to the point that Council Member Juan brought up, not yet having the details of that capital delivery and having it expected to be delivered to us next week while also being asked to vote on and adopt the budget. I don't know how we do that without that information because given the times that we are in, I think that there has to be a much more... in the weeds approach to how we tackle the budget this year. So I do want to flag that that is needed and I don't think it's appropriate to rush through this decision this year, ever, but especially not this year. So I don't know what our, I do not understand to his point how this budget complements the vision that we are talking about because I there seems to be we seem to have a lot of vacancies or we seem to have we're shifting a lot of people and creating a lot of vacancies what is our dependency on outside contractors it's great that we're reducing FTEs or you're saying that we need less but what does that mean in terms of dependency on outside contractors because what I see in every department but focusing on yours but especially your department is burnout and I don't I don't necessarily put that on one person, but it is reflective of the choices we are making on how to advance our city in a transit way. So the reason I asked for the vision, the reason I want to understand the priority list, the reason I want to know what classifies as emergency services is because an understanding of how we're deploying resources, because if it's just plug in, like put a figure, like plug up every hole you see, THAT'S NOT A PRIORITIZED LIST. AND IF IT'S DEPLOY PEOPLE AS FAST AS YOU CAN IN REACTIONARY MATTERS, THEN WE'RE LOSING EMPLOYEES, AND THEN WE'RE NOT BACKFILLING VACANCIES, AND THEN WE'RE OVERLY DEPENDENT ON OUTSIDE CONTRACTORS, AND THEN COST GOES UP.

SO. THANK YOU FOR THAT, COUNCILMEMBER. NOT KNOWING WHO'S SPEAKING NEXT, LET ME JUST LEAVE THIS WITH YOU. LISTEN, I JOINED THE DEPARTMENT IN 2023, JANUARY. Taking in all the data and understanding that this was a very young department, as is Nashville DOT and other departments throughout the country, I want to say that the work that we've put in, some might call it burnout, some might call it accountability, some might recognize that not everyone could join this train or ride this ship with this team, considering where we were going. The vision, the hard work, this is hard work. This is hard work. You guys, over the last three years, have been on us. And I will say, this has been, you know, Council Member Juan might have mentioned popcorn yesterday, this has been a ride over the last three years. But because we've worked together, I think this department has evolved, aligned, and has become one of the more elite departments and working with our other departments within the city. The amount of paving that we've done, the amount of maintenance work that we've done, the number, you can ask Carla Smith, the number of emails that come from this body, come from our constituents, may lead to burnout, but it means it leads to hard work. This group has buffed their backsides to bust their humps, to deliver, to make sure that the people, residents such as myself, are taken care of. And we've gotten to a point where there's a level of accountability, reliability. The support that we've gotten from the administration has truly been a great story to tell about the city of Atlanta. ATL DOT is a brand that we stand on that we are very proud of and we look forward to discussing the you know the transition of resources because it'll become very evident that what we've heard over the last three years is you need to deliver you need to deliver on behalf of the city and we have tried to realign this department to address delivery much of that transfer has been split funding of our resources where Honestly, everyone around here works about 40% on capital delivery or delivery in one form or fashion, and much of that is due to Carla Smith. But I just, whatever is needed to support the process as we move forward, we're here for it.

I appreciate that. But I want to go back to saying that I don't see how this budget supports the vision. And I want to acknowledge everything you said about the team. There's not a lack of talent within the department. There isn't. But I do have to say that the intention, in my opinion, of the budget is to protect against burnout. And so I hear you all about excellence, but my concern is about resources. And so my question, I want to come back to the employees. What are we doing to retain them?

And we just celebrated our employees at Employee Appreciation Day, and thank you to the mayor for joining us. It was a great event and really helped us recognize there's been a lot of change and anxiety, but we are meeting the mark. So this budget, which you'll recognize, helps realign some of those funds and some of the funds and the experience that we've had since fiscal 25, and especially given the type of workforce we have now. So I hear you 100% on your concerns about this budget. However, we feel that we're in a position to only accelerate our progress as we move forward.

Well, I think that's my concern is the word accelerate, right? I think we're moving at a breakneck pace, and I understand how trying to do things very quickly may seem like wanting to accomplish, and I know that that is not set by you all. You're given a mandate. You have to follow it. But I would think that rushing infrastructure only leads to a more expensive fix later down the line. And I'm still, once again, still, I feel like I still haven't gotten my questions answered in terms of how the budget, how you were able to drop in full-time employees, how you were able to reduce staff and then say you were also going to accelerate. I don't see how that doesn't lead to burnout. I don't see how that doesn't lead to an over-dependency on outside contractors. I don't see how that doesn't make projects more expensive. And to the point about, like, I hear you about employee appreciation those days. This culture existed long before you came, Commissioner. Those should be had. But when I talk about retainment, I'm talking about how we're competing with the private market and the private sector. I'm talking about how am I ensuring that that employee can go home and put food on their table and not have to work a second job driving Uber or something else in order to make things work. If they're engineering for the city of Atlanta or doing project design, how are we ensuring that they can stay in their home, that they can afford to support their family, that they don't have to seek outside work, that they don't have to get increasingly burnt out? That's what I'm wondering. I'm wondering how we keep our folks from getting poached by the private sector. Again, I suppose I still don't understand how we're retaining employees. I appreciate the employee appreciation day, but I still feel that that question wasn't answered.

Well, and I don't know that I will be able to answer your question, but I will say this is a tough economy right now.

Yes.

To be at the city and have a job given our benefits and fringe and where we're headed, there is a sense of pride, but I receive your concerns.

So let me ask my question a different way. Is there steps being taken to advance existing employees to reduce dependence on outside contractors? Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely. So that's just an augmentation of the need of work. and I'll keep this brief, much of what you're seeing in the city has not happened in 10 plus years. It's happening and we need to recognize, and I shouldn't use the word need, but the acknowledgement of the work that's happening brings a sense of pride. So there's growth opportunity within the department. There is some structural changes that we've done And I mentioned, you know, we're getting into traffic business. There's a lot happening within the department. So I don't know that I'll be able to answer that question directly. However, ATL DOT is a brand that we stand on.

All right. One more question, then just like a closing summation. Page 473 within the budget there on the first part, salary is regular. where it talks about that decrease. Decrease reflects adjustments and the reallocation of personnel to align staffing levels with operational needs. What in the word salad does that mean?

Okay, so when we talked about how we use our capital funding to support the realignment of addressing the needs, split funding, what am I missing?

What we're doing is we're realigning resources to meet the needs of our capital delivery programs. So we're taking some of the salaries And then we're shifting them to our capital funding mechanisms in order to meet the necessary needs that we have for capital delivery.

Understood. And I appreciate the answers. I appreciate you all letting me question you with the same questions again and again. But to hammer home the point of protecting against employee burnout, once again, I understand and I appreciate your breakdown of the budget and you saying that you have everything you need. I don't see how that is the case, just because I know what you have been given is an ambitious goal. You have a great team. There's a lot of talent here. But the one-off situations and emails and the lack of standardized process, which I know you're still trying to get your arms around, but it is an issue. And I am hearing that the staff is overwhelmed. And it feels like y'all are increasingly buried because there is so much. To answer the question of if your budget is able to support the vision that you have set. we're going to need to know what the capital delivery list is because that what has what the constant theme and consistent theme here is. Every time we ask a question that comes back to capital delivery with salaries with fts with everything else and so it's very clear that Council needs those numbers in front of us before we make a decision on the budget, so please, please, please, if we could have those numbers. And again i'm i'm. I want to highlight the work y'all have done because it's been incredible. And I really, I just, I have to give you a shout out, but I do want to say that the community talks about consistency is a problem. I know that I see it with the staff and I know that you're telling me it's fine, but there's clearly something missing here and I'm going to do my best. We're all are to figure out what that is. Okay. And I do appreciate your work, but I do believe there are some things here to be reconciled within your departmental budget. Appreciate you guys.

Thank you. Council President.

Thank you. I also want to thank you all for coming before the firing range and speaking to us and giving us your budget. aspirations um i do have a few things because i you know i i'm i'm finding it really hard to just let go of my district you know working with council member martin is is um you know so it's so exciting when when we have so many eyes pleasure's all mine I enjoy it honestly, so you know he allows me to hold his hand and as we skip through District 11 and we're going to have to do that one more time on cascade complete streets Okay, because as I was listening to you all speaking about the project During this budget season. I just want to make sure that we are all on the same page so at the end of my conversation today I just want to make sure that our teams are aligning us standing on the project and that's going to be right at the top of the east side of the cascade complete streets to talk about where we are with that that's going to be me. you Deputy Commissioner Allen and Kavanagh's please come and Councilmember Martin and maybe Carla Smith too because she really just gets it and not because it probably because she was sitting right here in this seat for so long and then back in those offices for so long like she really does get it and I just think that we do need to have a conversation because I didn't hear the the the sound answer of phase one and phase two, I just hear us glossing over it. And there are specific phases to cascade complete streets. And phase one was not completed. It's maybe two thirds completed. And now I want to know if we're trying to, and we weren't supposed to move on to phase two until one was completed. And I just want to make sure that we're always doing what we say we're going to do, not just on Cascade Road, but on all of our complete streets, because I truly enjoy our complete street. And I want to make sure everyone is feeling as wonderful as I am on their streets everywhere. So just want to get a clear view of exactly where we're supposed to be with our phases. We want to talk specifically about our punch list, because we don't even have to guess about it. Like, it's a matter of record. It's all written. I have it all. And I mean, I know you guys probably remember me saying this a million times, but I literally, before even thinking about becoming a council member, I was picking out the color of those benches on Cascade Road, and we talked about trash cans and everything. And I had my daughter there. She helped. And I just want to make sure that we are being intentional about everything and not just glossing over it. So Council Member Martin, we're going to hold hands and skip down Cascade and talk about those things. I want to thank you for... taking care of Adam's drive. That is absolutely necessary. Also Childress, that's been a thorn for a while because it is so heavily traveled and it looks really bad. It needs curbs and gutters and everything. So thank you for Childress too. Last thing I want to talk about making sure that this budget, like what about this budget will ensure that our Cascade exits, and any of the ramps, exit ramps that we've invested in, because remember we actually invested in our ramps as a city, because GDOT wasn't gonna do it, no one was gonna do it for us, so we invested in making sure they were beautified. And now the Cascade, the whole, all four ramps are invaded with invasives and it just is hundreds of thousands of dollars so we're going to have to make sure that this doesn't happen what about this budget ensures that we are not wasting our investment i'll pause on that one yes deputy commissioner smith will address the maintenance of our gateways

yes uh thank you uh council president so yes we have a annual contract there will be a new contract that is coming online within the next 30 days that will include routine maintenance and beautification of that cascade uh uh exit and all around that we worked on and it will it will look great okay so for budget's sake

Do we agree that when we make these investments, and it's an investment because it took like how many, like four years for us to pull the plug and just go ahead on and make that investment. Do we agree that when we make these investments, we cannot let contracts lapse and we have to keep up our maintenance or we've squandered our investment? Do we agree?

Wholeheartedly.

Okay, so that's good news. I'm glad to hear that and glad I asked because there's probably not any days that go by that I don't sit on that ramp and I'm looking in every bush that's covered with weeds and I'm thinking, Oh, my goodness. What is going on here? This is every day. I have too many pictures to keep sending them. But yeah, so I will be reaching out. My team will be reaching out so that we can have that. And I'm sorry, there is one more thing on here. Greenbrier Parkway. We talked about bike. I hear you all speaking about bike lanes. I'm excited about the protected lanes that can be used for bikes. It's coming on Campbellton Road with the more MARTA dollars. I'm excited about that. However, I know you've had community engagement with the Greenbrier Parkway resurfacing. No one wants bike lanes there because it doesn't connect to anything else. There are no bike lanes on the north or the south of it, and they feel like they're screaming, no thank you, to that one area around the mall, and no one is listening. So I'm just saying it out loud. That is not the place because it has not been accepted there and it doesn't connect to anything. Now, once BRT is in on Campbellton Road, that protected lane is there. We'll see how that goes and we can revisit it. But at this time, no one no one wants it.

Thank you, Council President. We will advise Council Member Martin when we meet with him this week.

I wasn't going to say it on the microphone, but that's what I was referencing earlier.

Yeah, I don't mind saying it on the microphone.

I see. And I don't mind you saying it on the microphone either.

Okay, good. So thank you, I yield, Chair.

All right, thank you. We have a follow-up question from Council Member Norwood.

Yeah, are we doing anything to have contractors be held accountable when they are damaging our streets and doing their projects?

Yes, I will first speak and then I'll pass the mic to Deputy Commissioner Smith. Absolutely. What we recognize is our inspections need additional effort to ensure or we need additional energy to ensure that restorations and the coverage of our inspections address all of the locations where all the contractors are throughout the city, the whole of the city. We are investigating if we can bring in consultants to help us with the inspections, but also we beefed up our inspection

Team to make sure that they are capable of enforcement and working with our maintenance group I'll let Deputy Commissioner Smith speak today and just a few more points on that council member Norwood we worked with law over the last few months to implement a new SOP that talks about how we enforce in the right of way. And so, we have an SOP that has progressive steps. If we find a contractor or somebody's working in the right of way, we will first issue a notice of violation to give them an opportunity to correct whatever the issue is. But if they don't correct it within that, say, a timeframe, then we move to the citation phase. We have about 12 or 13 inspectors that just got recredentialed to enforce and write tickets. And so, you know, this fiscal year, you will see more enforcement, more notices of violation, and if necessary, more citations being written.

Right. Thank you. And I just want to do a shout out to Carla Smith. I know it seems like a Carla Smith But we had, and y'all had a firm that did a, in my opinion, not representative of what we had hoped would happen with the only, I only got two sidewalks in District 8 that were even on the table right now. And this was one that was not thoughtful and Carla arranged for y'all to redo the plan with something that does not destroy the street and the neighborhood. And it connects to a park. It's very important. So kudos to y'all to go back to the well, get a new plan done. This is one that's been funded for years. So this is not looking for new money. This is finishing up old projects. So I wanted to say y'all were very resourceful in that and I appreciate it.

All right, thank you. Councilmember Bond has a follow-up.

I have a follow-up. I have one question about ARRA bonds and another question about sidewalks. So to piggyback off of Councilmember Bakhtiari's questions about the ARRA street repavings, I did want to follow up about Ralph McGill and ask, I guess, are there bike lanes planned for that street? Is that one of those that meets a criteria of it's just not, the plans were not ready in time?

Yes, thank you for that Councilmember. Yes, Ralph McGill is slated for a complete street style improvement after design is complete and we're going to transform Ralph McGill as from what you see now to that connectivity cross town. So we're looking forward to that.

So will there be bike lanes?

Yes, yes.

Okay, great, okay, okay. Wanted to make sure. Protected bike lanes?

Yes.

Okay, excellent. Another question about sidewalks. So have been really grateful to Carla and y'all's team helping us try to use the rest of our renew funds for sidewalk repairs in District 2. I did have a question. I know ATL. has put together a sidewalk inventory, correct?

I'm sorry, I missed the first part of the question.

Has ATL. put together a sidewalk inventory?

Yes.

Okay, great. And is it up to date with like the current status of repairs?

Yes, and we are currently re...

revisiting or re-scanning all of our assets with one of our consultants so yes and I know you probably only have like ballpark estimates but what is your assessment of our current sidewalk landscape and how it's improved over the years so shucks

We have our pavement condition index and our sidewalk condition index. And I will get that number to you. I don't want to say the wrong thing or provide you with the wrong number. However, we have it for your district and all districts. And as we're updating our scans, we'll send out the new results. But I'll shoot that over as soon as possible if you don't have the scans from last year. Yeah, that'd be helpful. Absolutely.

And what was I going to say? Shoot. Oh, could you explain all the different streams of revenue that fund sidewalk repair?

Oh, yes. So we have bond and T-splash dollars that focus tax dollars and bond dollars towards the sidewalks throughout the city. We also have our general fund dollars through our maintenance team that fund sidewalk repairs. We're about to close out all the downtown ARA sidewalk improvements and repairs. And am I missing any other funds? Restoration from Georgia Power and our utilities, we coordinate those. Those aren't directly from the city. However, Watershed does a number of restoration improvements throughout for any disruption. So I have a few streams.

and this is probably also gonna be a ballpark answer, but what would you say ratio-wise, how is that funding distributed?

Shucks. We are upwards of 60% of our entire program sidewalks, and that was intentionally done as part of our Moving Atlanta Forward Renew and our maintenance program.

And in terms of which streams of funding, like, which is the largest for sidewalks?

It's obviously the Moving Atlanta Fort, our bond, and our T-SPLOS, yes.

I have one follow-up question on that, which is, I know in our city's charter, it states that the burden of sidewalk repair is on the property owner. Do you think that that impedes our ability to repair sidewalks? Like, to what extent is that creating a problem?

Deep breath. So, I will just say, to keep it short, we are the city. It is the responsibility of residents, as a resident, to maintain and take care of the property out front. We have a responsibility as well as fiduciary to make sure that people are safe, people can travel from point A to B, and the most vulnerable are taken care of. So that's why our ADA program and our sidewalk program is so robust because in any given city you want to make sure that people have options and walking and rolling is one of the top priorities for the city.

And if let's say that was not a part of the city's charter, what would you say would be the major revenue stream that would fund ongoing sidewalk repair? I'm asking a lot of hard questions today.

No, no, no, they're leading, which I appreciate. But hypothetical, I do not know. But this is a philosophical conversation, I think, that we definitely can have as we think about the future and our comprehensive transportation planning for prioritizing projects.

Awesome. Thank you.

Thank you for those questions.

All right. Thank you. I think we've gotten through all the questions from my colleagues. I did have one, you know, obviously you all have a, you know, four to five different funds that you can tap into for various capital projects across the city. Some of those are, you know, long overdue. Council member one and I was just talking about Monroe Complete Street System and talked about for over 12 years. Obviously anyone who has ever done a project at home knows that you know project costs go up over time, especially after they're delayed I know you all have contingencies and all these different funds. upwards I think around 20% that I think you all kind of pass some of these projects, but you know we're seeing projects going way north of that so. How are we handling that? Because these funds, they're capped. And a lot of these projects are already encumbered. So just walk that through with me.

Great question. Thank you for that, Councilmember. So folks are saying we're going way over the ceiling. What we're finding, we're not going way over. We are finding efficiencies within our program. We are rethinking our designs and what we're actually constructing. So if we can go through the analysis, however, we're finding a number of efficiencies and we're passing those efficiencies on to other projects. So we can only spend monies from one program on that same program. So I'll give an example. West Paces Ferry, we found huge savings on that we assign that to safety and other improvements and also adjacent connecting corridors and improvements for that connection so you know this idea that we are going way over in terms of our budgets and our delivery is not true we are making every effort to take full advantage of the dollars and what we're also finding are efficiencies with our contract community They are choosing to do work with us. We've gone to a different, using a different instrument for how we contract and put out work. And I have examples of how we're saving considerable dollars and contractors are coming back saying, hey, I have capacity. Do you need anything else? So that's a conversation that I look forward to sharing with council member, council president. Sorry.

transportation chair and uh to filling in um in terms of the progress and how we're doing in terms of the dollars spent okay and and like i think one of my colleagues mentioned earlier getting that personnel paper i think is going to really help us kind of i guess reconcile what we're seeing from a personnel reduction standpoint um in this budget um you know obviously i think we all see you all are moving pavement you you you know you're you're Blue Street projects are being started around the city. Some of us are able to work here. And so we see a lot of work that you're doing and really appreciate it. So if there are no other questions from colleagues, We are 10 minutes ahead of schedule, so colleagues, we will be able to break for lunch. We appreciate you and your team for being here today. Colleagues, after lunch, we will get back started at 1 o'clock with the Department of City Planning, followed by the Department of Human Resources at 2 p.m., and we will end the day with the Department of Labor at 2.30. So thank you all. Appreciate it.

Thank you. Thank you.

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All right. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the afternoon session of the council's review of the mayor's proposed FY27 municipal budget. I'm Jason Winston, chair of the Finance Executive Committee. Currently, we are joined by council members Westmoreland, Wan, and Norwood, and other council members will trickle in and out as we continue these briefings today. We are going to start the afternoon session with the Department of City Planning. And I'll ask Commissioner Prince to introduce your team and get started.

Good afternoon. We're excited to be here. I am Commissioner Janae Prince. And to my right, Deputy Commissioner Janisa Elias. To my left. Tiffany Cope, our Business Operations Director, and Greg Pace, who is the Director of the Office of Buildings. We are joined by a number of our staff members who have very specific areas of subject matter expertise. And if you have questions that they need to answer, they're here for you. So let's get started. Do I need to click through this myself? Because it's here, okay, I just want to make sure. Okay. I have here for you a quote from Mayor Dickens. Everything you love about Atlanta has a planner's thumbprint on it somewhere. It's true, it's true. A lot of Atlantans may not realize how much of an impact the Department of City Planning has on their everyday lives. And honestly, we agree with the mayor. Everything you love about Atlanta has DCP's thumbprint on it somewhere. Let me tell you about our mission statement. If you're not completely sure. We enable high quality, sustainable growth and development of Atlanta by facilitating housing for all people, enabling thriving neighborhoods, creating vibrant economic opportunities, promoting exceptional design in architecture and public spaces, advocating for preservation of historic places, implementing innovative regulatory practices, ensuring safe and durable buildings, providing attentive customer service, and using inclusive public engagement in all of our work. Here you see our departmental organizational chart. I have seven directors under me. And I'd like to point out some of the ones that aren't up here with me. Kiara Holmes is the Director of the Office of Zoning and Development. Say hi, Kiara. There you go. Okay. Doug Young is our Director of the Office of Design. Dr. Jay Matthews is over our Office of Housing and Community Development. Leah LaRue is our Director of Communications and Neighborhood Relations. And Lauren Lackey is our Director of Data Strategy and Innovation. We've had a really strong year and have already passed some of our goals for fiscal year 26. We are meeting and in some cases exceeding our service level agreements. As you can see, we can report a construction valuation of $3,765,566,276. That's a lot. We are proud to have completed 8,129 affordable housing units, and we have another 5,000 and some underway. We're on track to have a 10% increase in our NPU participation. And we've recorded over 20,000 touch points with residents and our stakeholders through the NPU process and also through the other projects that we are doing that have community input and public meetings like Chattahoochee BRIC, Zoning 2.0, our African American History Series, small area plans that we've been participating in. I know you know we're out there. So here are some accomplishments for DCP. Mayor Dickens hosted college night for us and that was getting students from all of the local colleges to come out and network with planning professionals because what we're trying to do is to create a pipeline of students who are interested in our work and have them help guide them in their courses, and have them come work with us eventually. We've also got the Civic Responsibility for Young Leaders program. This is a summer program that we have that is two weeks long, and it's for high school students that come and shadow city leaders and learn about what we're doing. They also do a mock city council meeting, which you all might find really interesting if you want to come and sit in. The students learn so much about the city departments. Honestly, I don't know who enjoys it more, if it's us or if it's them, but it's a really great, great experience. I want to point out that our team won an award from the Georgia Planning Association for community engagement. Our team for community engagement through the CDP. I know a lot of you were involved in those meetings and you've seen what we've done. I'm really proud of this team. We also were able to get New Hope AME Church a historic designation this year. Everybody was very much excited about that. We're also working on Zoning 2.0, testing it. We've done a lot of work on this to make sure that it'll work. Now, we've completed all of the zoning testing, but what we're trying to do right now is work with it on the tree preservation ordinance, making sure tree preservation and planting standards work together with the standards that we have in the zoning ordinances is crucial. We've implemented our tree removal assistance program for seniors this year. I donated $400,000 to the Georgia Arborists Association to administer the program. We've also done a lot of good work with the English Avenue neighborhood. We've done the crosswalks there, artwork, and this is one of the mayor's NRI neighborhoods, so it's really great to have this investment. We've also done training for leasing professionals. As you know, In the city, we have several areas where affordable housing is required. And leasing professionals need to know how to manage these programs. So we do ongoing training for them. Ms. Lena Martinez, who is here in the audience, she conducts those trainings if you have additional questions about it. Okay, looking ahead, we've got a lot to do. We're super excited about all of the work that we're doing in the Chattahoochee Riverlands and Chattahoochee Brick area. Having the Chattahoochee Brick Park site open to the public will give unprecedented access to the Chattahoochee River. Now, I know that you all were involved in our comprehensive development plan, and you know that that plan is at 30,000 feet. And so we promised the neighborhoods that we would come back out and do a deep dive into any neighborhood that wanted us to come out and do a plan. So we're working on our small area planning. We're calling it neighborhood planning because that's really what it is. We're working on our neighborhood planning program. We also have our Planning Atlanta Together project. This is where we are ensuring that the NPU system continues to represent Atlanta neighborhoods effectively by evaluating the boundaries, gathering community input, and identifying opportunities to strengthen participation. We want to make sure that the NPU system is doing what it is intended to do and doing it well. We're also getting ready to launch Opal. That's Oracle permitting and licensing. And Ms. Lauren Lackey is over that work. And let me tell you, it's a lot of work. Going through the data, making sure everything transfers and transfers correctly so that we have a smooth transition. And we're relaunching Love Our Places. I know you all remember this during the pandemic of the work that we did there. And it's super exciting. Our Office of Design is doing this work. And NPU University, which has provided quality civic education to over 6,000 Atlantans to date. We're wanting to go even further in fiscal year 27. You know, it's very important to have this because You can't have conversations about city planning if you don't know the vocabulary. So NPU University is a great way to learn about what the city does and how to get involved. Okay, let's get into the numbers. I know you're all excited about this. This is our position count. This is important because personnel is 80% of DCP's budget. This data is from February, what you see on the screen. The position count, the general fund position count is 335. 216 are filled, 119 are vacant. We may have a little bit more recent data here. You'll notice a reduction in headcount from fiscal year 26 to fiscal year 27. And the difference is due to transfer of 16.6. You know, some positions are dual funded. Transfer of positions from general fund to other funding sources. Here's the final chart. Okay, our fiscal year 27 budget reflects an overall budget of $25.3 million. 21.3 million of that is for personnel. The budget also proposes an allocation of 3.1 million to purchased and contracted services. If you have questions about the projects that they're going to, happy to detail that for you. Also in here is the category for the permitting software. Smaller plans, Main Street, NPU community impact grants, and other necessary platforms for zoning and permitting, as well as daily operations. Also reflected here is a supply budget of $253,000. Interfund proposed budget of $170,000, which aligns with our projected spend for motor vehicle repairs and fuel. And lastly, GMA lease payments for our vehicles. And this concludes my presentation. We're all here to answer your questions. And if you want me to leave it on this one or go back to another, just let me know.

You can leave it there. Thank you so much for the presentation. We're going to start off with questions from my colleagues. We'll start off with Council Member Bakhtiart.

Yeah, thank you. Good afternoon. There's a lot to dive into, but first I want to always say, I always want to kick it off by saying thank you. Commissioner, I've said this several times every single time. I think you all come to report that we've tasked you with the department with doing a lot, a lot of policy, a lot of heavy constituent-facing services, and thank you all for all of the heavy lifts. We're going ahead and diving into the... presentation. When I think of DCP planning, I really think of the mayor's commitment to the affordable housing goals. That's what I think of when I think of the broader vision of what the direction of how the city is set. So I want to say absolute support of his commitment to build 20,000 units of affordable housing that we know we are in desperate need of. And it can't happen without DCP, can't happen without Office of Buildings, can't happen without permitting and inspectors. And so I think similar to what I asked transportation, what is the vision for the department helping to advance the mayor's goal?

I'm glad that you asked that. It's important to know that the fluctuations that we have in budget are partly because we don't do the same thing every single year. Sometimes we have different projects. For example, for the past two years, we had CDP and the zoning ordinance. And now we're working towards lots of other things, but we've never let go of the affordable housing goals. Not once since we got here, since I got here. And we have a group of people who work together with the Mayor's Office of Policy on housing work, our Office of Housing and Community Development. And part of the Neighborhood Reinvestment Initiative is staffed with DCP staff from the Office of Housing and Community Development. So we are very heavily invested in these efforts in terms of staffing and all of the work that we do. In the zoning ordinance, we made sure that we could incorporate things that make it possible to have more density and more affordable housing. So we're doing this with our staff time and with our policy.

Understood. I appreciate that. I don't feel like I feel like we talked around. the response, and I understand that you are heavily invested. I do not doubt that for two seconds. I think DCP has been heavily invested in everything, in every task you all have been given. What my concern is, is not the investment, but again, the technical details and how these things are being executed. And I understand what you're saying about staffing, but the reflection I'm getting from the businesses in my district, from housing permitting, from all of these things is that My small businesses are reporting losing hundreds of thousands of dollars. So that's for other districts, millions of dollars citywide because of a lack of standardized protocol and because they can't get through the permitting process. And that's not just with these businesses, it's with housing as well. It's with our small home builders that are really, really, really having a lot of trouble navigating the process through DCP and especially through office of buildings. So my question is, again, how does this budget get more inspectors on the ground and permits out the door more efficiently.

Okay, gotcha.

Mm-hm.

Greg, do you wanna talk about the inspector staffing?

Sure. Good afternoon, Council members. Council Member Bakhtiari, to I guess answer your question directly regarding inspectors, we have, of course, you may be aware that we discontinued our contract with NOVA. And once we discontinued our contract with NOVA, we hired seven inspectors that can replace them. Currently, we're pretty much at pace of all inspections being completed within the SLAs. We're at probably a 98% rate of inspections within two days.

When you say inspections, do you mean what inspections? Can we name what you mean?

Inspections regarding permits, building permits.

So building permits, not business. We're specifically talking, obviously, office of buildings. So we're specifically talking all permits related to buildings and all of the ones you currently have in your docket.

Yes, and so the only other, but the other inspections would be in regards to complaint inspections as well as arborist inspections and again with the complaint inspections those are being those are being completed within probably it's going to be at a lesser rate we were probably at about 80 85 of um following up on complaints when they're when they're logged and everything associated with a building permit and what time frame are you all responding I'm sorry. And what time frame are you? Three business days.

At most?

At most.

Please continue, sorry.

Yes. And the office inspections are up under the building inspections area associated with permits. And again, all those are done within, again, two business days.

How many funded vacancies does DCP currently have? And how many of those exist within OOB?

So we have 15 funded vacancies and they're all within the Office of Buildings.

Okay, because at the last quarterly, I believe you reported that you had 53 funded vacancies and 29 of those were in Office of Buildings.

You had 50 funded vacancies?

53 funded vacancies, 29 in Office of Buildings, and that was during DCP's last quarterly. We pulled it off the present, I pulled it off the presentation.

We have done some hiring since that time. I believe that was March, but I will have to go back and look at those reported numbers to confirm that.

Yeah, because that's a fairly large discrepancy. If there's a chance to fact check that, that would be a huge help because my concern is about staffing, especially, quite frankly, in office buildings because that's where we're having the most inconsistencies. You brought up Nova staffing and since 2022, I believe that we retain them, correct? Yes. And what services are they supposed to provide?

The NOVA contract was for building inspections, and it also included plan review and two planners. And we started phasing out the NOVA contract in October of last year, and we've just ended it here in March. Utilizing the services of NOVA, it was making everything cost twice as much per hour as it would to have people in house. So what we've done is we've brought people in house. We started with the planners. then the plan reviewers, and we've just now gotten all of the inspectors hired. So we don't have to utilize the NOVA contract anymore. And we deliberately did it that way in phases so that we would not exceed our service level agreements. 88% of our residential inspections are happening within the SLA. to make sure that we weren't causing delays.

Okay. Because looking at the numbers, we've retained NOVA the last three years, and I believe over that time we have paid them $9.9 million over the last three years, $4.5 million in 2023, $4.5 million in 2024, and $900,000, close to $1 million in 2025. So I'm trying to understand... through the last year of services, what positions that were retained. And quite frankly, if that money would have been better served going into operations, given the shrinking staff that you all have and the ever-growing demands. So I'm just, again, contracting services in the over-dependence and outside contracts feels $9.9 million is not a small amount of money. And given that your budget has just been reduced to What was it? What's the proposed amount?

25.3 million.

25.3 million. Quite frankly, that's a minuscule amount for a department that's being charged with doing so much for this city. And I know that you're saying that this works with the vision and what you've been proposed, but witnessing here, city services being the department that is answering constituents, I can tell you that that is not the case. The experience of my constituency, the experience up here, I can say of the representatives is we are not experiencing that this department is operating efficiently. You're not experiencing permits getting out the door in a fast, that timely fashion. I've had to get involved in every small, almost multiple small business permits in my district. I've had to get involved with build outs. I've had to get involved with things that I shouldn't because we can't get them unstuck. So I'm a little confused as to why we're using paying $9.9 million over the last three years for staffing services. And i'm happy to hear that we're discontinuing that but it feels like that money could have been better spent in enhancing our operations and making sure we're retaining employees and standardizing our processes, because it doesn't it still doesn't feel like we have a standardized process and. That continues to be an issue. And so i'm curious I think to that to that point i'm curious how is the department working to ensure consistency across licensing permitting and.

inspections one of the things that we're doing to address the delays in permitting i'm not sure what specific complaints you're hearing but one of the things i have been hearing is that permits get held up in other departments besides dcp they come through us everything comes through us but when i will get a complaint and i do chase down permits from time to time myself i will find that sometimes but respectfully commissioner you should not have to do that should be staffed out but please you know what i'm happy to jump in and do the same work as my staff i i'm a planner that came up not saying anybody's above it but i do want to say and i'm going to gently i'm going to push back here

We consistently hear about these individual things, these individual accomplishments. I hear all of that. But we sit here and we discuss Department of Budget. We discuss budgetly the department and the vision. It's not to hear the one-off things, but it's here the broader operations. I will get into the individual one-offs in departmental check-ins. But when we talk about this vision for this department and trying to understand how we don't drive our small businesses out of the city and try it, we don't get our home builders pushed out. Like I want It's the broader vision.

Well, let me finish, though. Sure. Because one of the things I was saying about how some permits will get held up in another department, and it always looks like, what is DCP not doing? Well, what we've done is we started this pilot program to bring in the reviewers from other departments, bring them into DCP. And they are sitting with our plan reviewers and working together. And it's really speeding things up. The pilot program is going very well. And the staff involved seem to be enjoying working together, the collaboration. And I think you would find if you talked to some of the applicants who had their plans go through this process, that it is working well. And I'd be happy to report more as we go further into it. But this is something we've just started because we have been looking for all of those things that hold up the permits.

Thank you. I'm going to close with one other question. Page number five in your presentation. DCP by the numbers. Have these numbers gone down at all year after year?

Which numbers exactly?

All of them, any of them. The permits issues, construction evaluation, MPU recommendations, the numbers.

Yes. Greg, do you want to speak to that? Yes, the construction valuation has gone down since about FY23 consistently. And the residential projects have pretty much maintained the same. It's been a large commercial projects that have kind of been declining in our numbers. probably between I want to say we probably estimate between last year and this year's construction valuation is going to be anywhere from 13, maybe 16% decline. Okay.

All right. I mean, I appreciate, I appreciate the feedback. I appreciate answering the questions. I'm going to, I will say that the inconsistencies and what I'm experiencing, I, don't seem to reflect what's here, so I'll probably have additional questions, but I will say is it seems that the responsibilities on you all is growing, especially with something like zoning 2.0 and continuing the TPO, and I don't see how you continue doing that work. and getting the housing numbers across the finish line, while also having your budget slashed for the third year in a row.

So, I will... Council Member Bocciaro, we very much appreciate your support, and I would be happy to sit down with you and talk about the experiences that your constituents are experiencing and work with you on strategies. Thank you.

And before we move on, if I may just correct my previous point regarding your question of funded vacancies. As of May 4th, we have 46 funded vacancies, of which 29 was in the office of buildings. Okay.

So what did you report before you went?

That was coming in FY27, what those funded vacancies would be. But as of May 4th, we had the 26.3 funded vacancies.

Okay. Thank you. You're welcome.

All right. Thank you, Council Member Martin.

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair, and thank you for being here today, Commissioner Prince and team. My comments and questions are really similar to my colleague, Council Member Bakhtiari, in that we, but it's from the different lens of more of the zoning enforcement side of work. As we think about the proliferation of illegal rooming houses in District 11, 10, probably nine, where you have these big lots, WHERE THERE ARE LARGE DRIVEWAYS, BIG HOUSES, AND FOLKS ARE CONVERTING THEM FROM, YOU KNOW, THREE-BEDROOM, TWO-BATHROOM HOUSES INTO TEN-BEDROOM HOUSES AND MARKETING THEM ON VARIOUS PLATFORMS THAT I WON'T NAME HERE BECAUSE I DON'T WANT TO, YOU KNOW, PEOPLE ARE WATCHING. It's creating an issue where the harmony that we've seen in communities is really being disrupted. And I know that we have a zoning enforcement team, so the specific questions that are related to the budget is, what are your current staffing levels for zoning enforcement officers? And what are you budgeted for in this FY budget period? and what is projected, because I'm looking at your budget going down, and much like the concerns of my colleague from the other side of the house, the building inspectors, in the same vein, are you losing people? Do you need more people? Because this issue is only going to get worse, I believe, as the city becomes more of an attractive destination for people to live permanently and to be housed temporarily for long periods or short mid-term periods of time. Not quite short term, but sort of that mid-period, 30 days or more. What are your current staffing levels around the zoning inspection side? And where do we need to be to make sure that we are fully able to respond to communities' concerns about these issues?

We have 16 funded positions for code enforcement. That includes zoning.

And that's zoning code enforcement, not APD enforcement. That's correct.

And eight of the positions are currently filled. We're actively advertising and interviews will begin the first week of June.

Gotcha. So you're about 50% staffed from what I'm hearing, and you are sourcing for talent now to get the other 50% filled. Let's just say we get all those filled by July 1st. Is that the appropriate staffing level? Is that 16 enough for a city as large as Atlanta is and as fast as Atlanta is growing?

16 is the level that we've had since I've been here. Okay. Because we do code enforcement by complaint basis, it is adequate. If we were doing a proactive code enforcement where we had officers driving every single street, every single day looking for violations, it would be different.

Got it. Thank you. When you get staffed up to 16, I would appreciate, I don't sit on CDHS, but I probably will attend your future updates. I would love to know a readout on how know your response levels have changed um hopefully it'll be for the positive and you know if there's a need to get a greater um staffing level in next year's budget cycle because again i look my district that i represent is an area where there's probably the most undeveloped land in the city and we also have have to couple that with these historic neighborhoods that have these big houses and so people are figuring out creative ways to redevelop those houses and repurpose them instead of better work for it and i think that We're going to see a greater need for zoning enforcement officers. And so I just really want to make sure that's a part of the tracking mechanism as you report to CDHS. And I'll be glad to lean in and make sure that we can. I look at myself as a partner, leaning in with you all to partner with you all to make sure that we're creating efficiencies in every way that we can. My next question, because Council Member Bakhtiari asked such good questions, I had a whole bunch, but most of them were addressed in her line of questioning. So my final question is around, we talked about the permitting review process. As we think about the current process, and I heard you loudly and clearly when you said that permits don't just get hung up in your departments. They get hung up in your offices. They get hung up in other areas that are outside of the DCP purview area. Is there an active plan in place to really just... study and look at ways that whether it be technology or whether it be manpower related or person power related ways that we can create efficiencies to move those permits. Is there an active process underway to look at those processes?

I've heard about this problem since I got here in September of 2022 and we tried a whole bunch of different things. And what is really working is this pilot program where we actually have the reviewers all in the same workspace. I think just good old fashioned collaboration and the ability to, you know, get up, walk 10 feet and go over and ask your coworker about something. It just goes a long way.

How often are y'all doing that? Is that like a standard, is it an SOP? Or you just kind of, you know, when you have a bunch of permits that kind of come in the same time, like what, is there a cadence to that?

Greg, what percentage of the permits would you say are going through the pilot program?

Currently, it's roughly about 15% of our permits. We started this pilot program March 30th. We're testing it out. Again, it's a pilot, and it is in every weekday process. But 15% of all of our permits that come in are dedicated to this pilot program.

And so is the end goal to create an SOP where all permits will go through that kind of process or, because I mean, I like what I'm hearing. That's good old fashioned, just being able to, that's why people need to come back into the building. You know, our mayor says that the city is a group project. It's just literally a group project. And so are we looking to, you know, I would say memorialize that and make that our standard operating procedure? Or are we, how long will it stay in the pilot phase?

Currently, the pilot is for 120 days. And the ultimate goal, you know, that's, I won't say above my pay grade, but that's out of my purview. But the intent is to see how this works, whether there are benefits from it. And if so, what are the next steps? That will be, you know... those above me that would make those decisions and determine how that works out.

If Council Member Westmoreland will agree, in the next update, I would love to hear more about that as well. I'm glad to be, if he'll let me know when it's on the agenda so I can come. So I think those are the kind of efficiencies that we have to explore if we're going to catch up to, you know, sort of catch up with the volume that we have. And so that's all I have, Mr. Chair. I appreciate it. Thank you all for answering my questions. All right. Thank you.

Next we have Council Member Norwood. She'll be followed by Council Member Wan.

Good afternoon. My question is about zoning 2.0 since I'm zoning chair. And do y'all have the staff available for the final let's get this done? We're sitting here mid-May and I'd said let's have another go at this by the end of June. And do we have the staff ready and able to give the council the kind of assistance that we're going to need to make sure we get this right over the next few months.

Well, just to tell everyone what's going on, we have finished drafting zoning 2.0. As you know, we are testing right now to see how it can work better together with the tree protection ordinance. Also, the Mayor's Office of Policy, they are looking at if there are any additional ways we can facilitate more affordable housing opportunities within the zoning ordinance. So we're waiting to hear back from their consultant. And we may need to put their consultant together with our consultant so we can get this wrapped up. So right now we're just waiting to hear back. Okay.

That's a little alarming to me because in the background I hear from time to time that what we have to do is ADUs and we have to take our single family residential zoning and we have to change it when we know we have vacant places. We know we've got retail, abandoned retail centers that could be ripe for redevelopment. So that's not a budget question, but I want to say on camera as zoning chair, what makes Atlanta special are the neighborhoods that we have. That's what makes it special. So I want to make sure that we don't go in a direction and this is for the administration who's ever listening um that will harm what we have worked so hard to have in every single council district in every single neighborhood um so what you're saying is you've got the staff for us to um get this over the finish line because i hope it's my hope that we get zoning 2.0 um adopted this year and i know we're a little later than our thoughts were last year, but in the next two or three months it would be great for us to get this put together. And I know that I've given y'all some feedback from various parts of town that have communicated with me. So I want to make sure that if we need to make any adjustments to your budget to make that happen, I certainly want to do that.

I think we have the staff. I think we're ready. very happy to get this across the finish line as quickly as possible.

Great. The other thing is, you know, we had, I've had a request to update 2.0, I'm sorry, to update the TPO because we know that there was a lot of controversy last year. Do we have the staff in place to review the TPO and work with me on whatever final adjustments need to be made there?

could be made there that i can present i would say that we do staff is actively working on this in the background you're not hearing much about it because we have to test it as you know the zoning ordinance dictates how much of the lot you're allowed to cover with buildings and pavement leaving a remainder where trees can be preserved or planted. And we have to make sure that all of this works together. It's important. And the staff is doing that now. Quietly in the background.

Thank you.

Council Member Warren.

Where's my button? All right. I wanted to follow up on a couple of questions. First off, I want to start with the FTE count. You said that And you answered the question where we adopted budget in FY26 had 351 positions. We're going down to 335, but that's a function of those 16 positions going to other split funds, right? Can you tell me the nature of both the positions as well as which funds those went to?

So let's see. There are nine positions going to the Tree Trust Fund. You all may remember in the Tree Protection Ordinance how it changed the funding sources for some of the staff positions. But the TPO does allow 14 positions, but we just got nine right now that are going. We have nine people in the Technology Trust Fund. That's our GIS team, our data and strategy people. We have one person who is funded by impact fees. And we are moving, we have position transfers to aviation because of the work that we're doing at the airport. And we are moving some positions to the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. These are positions that we have audited to make sure that they are working on nothing but affordable housing.

You're speaking in future tense.

Yes.

So is this for FY27 or is this for FY26?

So for FY27, it will be funded by the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. The Tree Trust Fund positions are already funded by the tree. the Tree Trust Fund, because when the Tree Trust Fund ordinance passed, or when the Tree Protection Ordinance passed, it moved them over effective January 1. It was January 1, right? Yeah. So they're all at different times, but the change for FY27 is the affordable housing positions because we had to audit them first.

Do you know the dollar amount approximately?

I think we do, actually.

Roughly 1.9 million. Okay. Thank you, CFO. All right. I'm going to mull on that for a little bit. Your budget... reduction of six percent um the salary line is that again because of the transfer out to other funds or is there more going on in that number reduction there are several things going on first we don't do the exact same work every single year right because we have different projects that require different dollar amounts we have also lost some people through attrition okay

We have done some restructuring, and we are moving some positions into other funding sources. So that's where it all comes from.

So the attrition I get, that results in a decrease, but restructuring shouldn't necessarily result in a decrease in your salary line item. Am I wrong?

We did eliminate some positions. What we did when we were putting together this budget As you, as you know, we do zero based budgeting, meaning we start from zero and we go through and we look at every single thing that we're going to do in the upcoming fiscal year. And we look at how much it's going to cost. We went through every line item in our budget. and looked at how can we do things more efficiently? How can we do things better? Should we move this from here to there? Do we still need to do this other thing? We really looked at it very closely. And yes, we did lose a couple positions because we found more efficient ways of getting things done.

You also attributed it to where we do a lot of every day is a different day, every year is a different year. So it helped me also understand how that translates into a Decrease in your salary line item to me. It would be Basically everyone's kind of shifting and doing different things But is there actually a structural change in addition to what you said in terms of your reorg? That is attributed to a different set of activities going in FY 27.

Well, I can give you some examples For example and the commissioners office we used to have a position that was wholly dedicated to open records requests and And in going through and auditing, we found that this particular person in this role did not need to spend 100% of their time working on open records requests. And we found another staff member could take on that work. And so we have eliminated a few positions trying to be more efficient and get more things done with fewer headcount. Now, we haven't eliminated a lot. A lot of we did have some people resign. So that's the attrition and moving around the funding sources.

I think I will just close by saying that I'm a little surprised to see your I feel like you, Transportation and Parks, are the consistent departments that when we see the budget request or the allocation go down, it seems counterintuitive, at least to me, because I don't see the level of activity in your department going down because I just feel like our BUILDINGS RELATED ACTIVITY, BE IT PERMITS, BE IT INSPECTIONS, BE IT NEW TYPES OF PROJECTS, BE IT THE ADDITIONAL WORKLOAD THAT NRI COULD POSSIBLY BRING IN, DOESN'T, AGAIN, INTUITIVELY SUGGEST THAT YOU'LL BE DOING LESS IN THIS NEXT YEAR. SO I'M CURIOUS, I'M GOING TO ASK THIS OTHER QUESTION, I'M GOING TO COME AT IT A DIFFERENT what would be your prioritization of incremental investment in your department? If you're thinking strategically forward, thinking about the next three to five years and what you anticipate for your department, what would, broad stroke, those incremental investments look like?

so for permitting that depends on how many applications we're receiving and you know it fluctuates the number of permits we have coming through the door are less than previous years we hit a peak right when i first got here sort of that post-coveted burst of activity and then it has slowly tapered off a little bit also it depends on what projects we're doing and if we're doing them in-house or if we're having a consultant help us As you know, CDP was a really big lift, and we had consultants working on it as well as staff. So in those years, when we're doing CDP work, we're probably going to ask for more budget. In the years that we have projects that we are doing in-house, such as the neighborhood planning, It's going to be less. We aren't going to need as many consultants. It's going to be more just the staff doing it. So I might be back here next year saying we need more money. But right now, honest to goodness, This $25.3 million is going to get us where we need to go.

So that wasn't what I was trying to get at. I am asking you to be visionary, to say, I'm going to project. I am the leader of this department. Everyone counts on me to be that, to project forward, to think ahead beyond FY27. And I guess I'm asking you. I mean, no one has a crystal ball, but I'm saying, what are the prioritizations of your investments? You kind of laid out a bunch of if this, then that. But your best guess as the leader of the department, how would you sequence those incremental investments that you just laid out?

So I want to go back to permitting very quick, which is very closely tied to the economy. I'm not an economist, but I can tell you that permitting is tied to the economy and it will slow down if the economy slows down, particularly tied to interest rates. For our planning work, we have a fairly predictable rhythm. Every five years, we're required to update the CDP. As you know, that's a lot of work. In the interim years, we do exactly what we promised the community, that we would do neighborhood planning work, which we can handle in-house. We won't need consultants. What I would like to do with this budget is invest in our staff and professional development and get everybody ready for this next cycle.

So you're very artfully not providing the answer that I was looking for, and I'm gonna go ahead and leave that there. I will say, to me, you know, I would love, I think there's still work to do on STR, and I don't know that you've thought if this budget includes the ability to do that. There's rumblings in the community wanting to revisit TPO. I can't tell if your budget includes that or not. I do know that we still have zoning 2.0 we've got to try and get. Those are kind of big lifts that I don't know that a 6% reduction, 7% in personnel that actually it will be doing this. will give us the capacity to do this. I'm going to close with, and this ties back to the FTE situation with going and putting in other funds. And while I do appreciate that we legally can do that, it makes me hearken back and look back to when we had the Buildings Enterprise Fund. whereby that money that was brought in by permits needed to stay. And I think there is a state law that requires this that needs to stay in your department to invest. And we wouldn't have to be fighting these annual battles to restore your budget. I'm not even talking about maintain. I'm talking about just trying to restore and allow you and your team to visionary and and to think about the you know incremental investments you could do with an additional X number of dollars to prepare for when the economy comes back to prepare for that again that next wave of NRI activity to prepare for when there's all these other new development forms that we haven't even imagined today And so I was here when we formed it. I was here when we dissolved it. And I know that the subject came up in a recent Council for Quality Growth meeting. I'm not sure that's not a bad idea, to be honest with you, because I think I'm just tired of fighting this fight every budget when your department drives the future of our city. Full stop. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield. Thank you. CFO Bala.

Thank you. Thank you, Councilwoman. There was a lot of questions that you mentioned and probably more oriented towards me in terms of construction and thought about approaching this budget. And you mentioned comparable departments in parks, ADOT, and planning. in which we are being very thoughtful in how we leverage all resources to make sure that those departments fulfill their mission and go in the step forward. As you know, Vice Chair Juan, this budget has to be balanced, has to be balanced on all fronts. There has been a legacy, a long standing practice of just dumping on the general fund because it's easy to dump on the general fund. You mentioned the prior buildings permit fund, probably one of the ugliest constructed funds I've ever seen, to be honest. It was acting like an enterprise fund, but did not operate like an enterprise fund. It did not pay for lawyers, it did not pay for finance. It did not pay for IT. It did not pay for any other infrastructure needs of an enterprise fund. And was utilized to supplement the department, yes. But I think it was the right decision at the time that council looked at it in detail and realized that it should just be dissolved. And we should go operating off of the general fund, which council made that determination to do. The funding that was left over was segmented and segregated and given strictly to the planning department to utilize over the years. They were utilizing it to pay NOVA contracts. They were utilizing it for capital needs. They've used it and exhausted it. over the time, but I would say that to think about reconstructing a fund like that, it should be done from a very thoughtful approach and a very mindful approach and to have it act and pay for all its utilization. And so when we construct them, it shouldn't be the same notion as when we have a park spill rate that is allowed to pay for maintenance. And when we pay maintenance with it, there is a little bit of pushback. You know, these are the kind of things in the discussions that I'm going to be wanting to have with council members in detail before budget adoption just to make sure about kind of the framing and the approach into making sure that, you know, the general fund is utilized and maximized as full capacity so that we're not overly burdening it. And by overly burdening the general fund, you're overly burdening taxpayers and fee payers of the city of Atlanta when there's other sources of funding that's available to fulfill the mission that they're constructed to fulfill. So again, you know, I'm just happy to have that conversation with anybody in detail. We can go in as granular as we want to be. I'm happy to have that discussion in more detail, but that is the theme and you have seen it in those departments where there's supplemental funding and that they have other resources and capabilities to utilize their funding. That's not the same for some of our other larger general fund departments that rely heavily and solely on the general fund.

I'M 100% AGREEMENT OF IT NEEDS TO BE CONSTRUCTED CORRECTLY. I THINK WHAT IS MOTIVATING MY COMMENT AND OBSERVATION THERE ARE TWO THINGS. NUMBER ONE IS LIKE I SAID THIS ANNUAL RINSE AND REPEAT ABOUT TRYING TO JUST SUSTAIN BUILDINGS BUDGET WHEN At least from what I can tell, there is an increase in activity, not a decrease. And if we're not ready to meet that and not stressing out the staff that is already in place, then that is one piece of it. The second piece of it is, too, is this notion of, hey, let's move forward. positions over to these funds yes it's it's allowable but at the same time you mentioned that one point some million dollars is being transferred over to the affordable housing trust fund yeah i agree but gosh wouldn't be nice if the enterprise fund could cover that for buildings and then we still had that 1.3 million dollars in affordable housing trust fund to go pay for some of the things that we've been asking for but have been blocked because that fund is dry so so it is from those two vantage points that i think that You know, it's just fatigue on my part in terms of these continued discussions and deliberations, and that is a potential thing worth exploring so that it relieves both of those, again, to your point, provided it is constructed correctly and utilized correctly. So, yeah, not that I'm dropping a paper today to do that, but I at least wanted to throw that out there because of the reasons I listed.

And I appreciate that, and I appreciate your leadership throughout this entire budget process. I mean, you've been very thoughtful and great to work with. I just wanted to note that these things have a lot of nuances and complexities to them, even with the Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which is a general fund funded trust fund. It doesn't have its own source of funding. It's extracted right out of the general fund at the beginning of the budget cycle. Two percent goes to Affordable Housing Trust Fund. and then you create other avenues of affordable housing work that no longer has funding opportunities or streams allowed for it, it causes, just by math, 2% more pressure on the general fund. Speaking of the planning department, we see in the planning department that has went from 21.7, 23.0, 23.6, 26.6, 26.9, 25.3. That is the planning department's general fund allocation over the last six years. Incrementally, there have been increases. The last couple budget cycles have been tight budget cycles. We've asked everybody to come and sharpen their pencils. The department did a fantastic job of looking at ways to be more operationally efficient, to do more with less, to work on upgrading systems such as NOVA, which hopefully will come online and will help deliver and streamline a lot of the pain points that people are experiencing right now. There's A LOT OF DIFFERENT MOVING PARTS AND APPLAUD THE DEPARTMENT FOR WORKING ON THAT. THE SUPPLEMENTAL STAFFING WITH NOVA WAS NEEDED AT THE TIME BECAUSE THERE WAS A LARGE BACKLOCK THAT KIND OF GOT PUSHED THROUGH POST COVID AND THAT REALLY HELPED US GET TO A BETTER SPACE. I KNOW THAT THERE'S A LOT OF WORK THAT THE DEPARTMENT OF PLANNING IS DOING AND WE'VE SEEN IT. WE'VE SEEN SOME SLUGGISHNESS BUT WE'VE SEEN THEM KIND OF WORK THROUGH and get some permitting out the way. The revenue numbers are starting to improve a little bit where there was a lagging in the beginning of the fiscal year, but we are coming out of a FY25 close where we had a $19 million deficit in a 26 close where we're closing that deficit. We'll knock on wood and hopefully there won't be one, but we're working hard to get us there. And we're constructing a 27 budget that is thoughtful in its approach to make sure that we don't make the same mistakes in the past, which is just have the general fund take care of it. These other accounts are operational accounts as well. They are intended to deliver a service, and it should be utilized in that manner to deliver that service.

All right. Councilmember Amos. Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. You know, some of my questions have been touched on, but I got very concerned when our commissioners say they looked at this budget line item by line item, and this budget represents efficiency. At the same time, you have a group of the governing body sitting here telling you the permit process is screwed up in the city of Atlanta. No other way to put it. And if it's not the people in which I truly believe it's not the people, sometimes it is the process itself. So a couple of months ago, we did send forward a paper to see, ask your office and law department, how do we create a 72-hour demo process? I mean, we have structures standing inside my district that should be torn down, could be torn down, but can't be torn down because they don't have a demo process. I have people being cited, dragged into court for not tearing down a property because they can't get a demo process, a permit. So that is an issue, and it seems like it's an issue throughout this city. Where in this budget will we begin to analyze? And first of all, thank you for realizing that your department is so massive and everything. There's a lot of things that affect the outcome that you don't control. So thank you for admitting and accepting that. I wish more of our commissioners would do that. But where in this budget did we begin to look at the process? not necessarily the people but the process if i have a standing structure that takes me six months on the structure have the money to take it down why is it taking six to seven months to get a piece of paper to say okay tear down greg do you want to speak to the delays in the demo process yes um thanks comes to my name is

There are many factors that can weigh into that. For the most part, if these structures are in a historic district, that's gonna require going through that process. If they're in an SPI district or an overlay district, that's gonna require them to go through that process as well. For the most part, We're relying upon the applicant to follow the rules and the steps to get through the process. We have SLAs within our offices, within every single aspect of our office that are consistently met. What people don't see on the other side of that is, the applicant may not be invested in that project. That applicant, the owner may have given it to an applicant, that applicant may be doing 20 other projects in other areas. And if there is a comment that is given to them and they don't respond immediately, it's gonna take some time. So a lot of the times it should not take six, seven months, but we're hoping well i am very very optimistic that our processes will and and the visibility of our processes will be improved with the opal without oracle permitting and licensing um the customer will be able to see what we see and there is no difference in the views they will see where they are in the progress and one of the things that i'm very very I'm very optimistic about seeing is the fact that we will be able to decipher city time versus applicant time and give you those numbers. Right now, we're unable to extract that. And that weighs into permanent heavily.

Thank you for that, because you answer the question and agree with me all at the same time. If it's burned, open and vacant, becoming a public safety issue, what matters if it's in a historic district, if it's an SPI district? It needs to come down. That's the process that I'm talking about. So if those are the things that need to be changed legislatively, those are the things we need from the department to say, hey, this is why it's taken 6, 8, 180 days to bring down, because there's nothing historic about a burnt-down structure.

And just to add to that, we do have a process in place for all interim projects and projects that are going through APD. So we have worked it out where they have a streamlined process for those types of projects. So again, I would love to sit down and be able to go through some of the scenarios and the addresses that you have these issues with so that we can actually get to the granular part of where we need to make some improvements.

Oh, I agree. And you and your team have been very good in responding when I reach out. But I'm like my colleague here, the commissioner, and sure or not, the city council member need to be reaching out, trying to find demo process permits. It shouldn't happen like that. But we're going to fix the system. I'm going to move on to everyone's favorite topic in the room. Where in this budget we start enforcing short-term rentals?

As you know, we drafted a new short-term rentals ordinance. I wouldn't even say new anymore. We drafted another short-term rentals ordinance, and it was filed.

So the answer is nowhere.

We're working with the current... short-term rentals ordinance that was adopted before I came to work here. And we are enforcing it per our guidance from the law department.

Last but not least, we're playing alphabet soup game. Budget should turn into process. So is this budget going to turn into a process that we can properly implement, organize, and ensure that we're doing the best services to the citizens of Atlanta when it comes to 2.0 short-term rental, Neighborhood Reinvestment Act, tree protection ordinance?

Well, I guess the answer is yes.

the snapshot in time that we will hold at a later date. Thank you, Mr. Chair, I yield. All right, thank you.

Got one final follow up from Council Member Bakhtiari.

Sorry, I just, there was something I wanted to clarify earlier that I said. Earlier, Commissioner, I said you shouldn't be the one chasing down permits, and that is not to demean that work in any way, shape, or form. And Council Member Juan said it very eloquently, that the housing team does set the future and the vision of the city. What I should be saying is to each and every single one of you who works in this office and is a part of this team, to all the people I know, to all the people whose names I do not know, you have an exhausting job, an exhausting job. And to all the thank yous we don't give you, I am sorry. I hope you don't see the questioning this budget as a way of demeaning your work in any way, shape, or form. I can guarantee you that the concerns of the body here are, again, whether this budget can protect our staff, the people who make this city work, from burnout, to make sure that we have processes in place that make us efficient. I absolutely respect, Commissioner, that you say you can make it work for this amount. I know you can. And I know you're willing to run down things. I know that about you. I'm saying to me it speaks to a systematic issue if you're having to. Because you do get to set the vision for this department. I have every faith that you're able to. again is that we aren't setting you up to succeed and I know what you're saying you can get it across the finish line but at what cost and when does good enough stop being we can do it but I would say good enough has been enemy number one of infrastructure in this city and in this country and so I hear what you are saying, but I would say our experiences reflect differently. I respect everything you said. I respect this department and the work that you all do, but I do want you to know I will be advocating for you all to have more. So thank you guys.

Councilor Bakhtiari, we very much appreciate your support and the support of all of the council members. We take no offense at these questions, and we're happy to work with you if you have ideas for us.

Thank you all. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Commissioner Prince. Thank you and your team. Thanks to everyone in your department for all you do for the city. Colleagues, we're going to quickly transition over to our next briefing, which is the Department of Human Resources.

Thank you. Thank you. We have a few. Okay. What's this? Oh, I apologize.

They told me that they were pregnant. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

All right, everyone. We are getting started with the FY2027 proposed budget of the Department of Human Resources. We welcome up Commissioner Blackburn. If you don't mind introducing your team, and then I'll let you get started with your presentation. Sure.

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Calvin Blackburn. I'm proud to serve and continue to honor to serve as Commissioner for the City of Atlanta's Department of Human Resources. Allow me a moment to introduce my wonderful team, starting and end, Dr. Carla Moore. And then we have Director Melandi Vincent, Compensation Director. DC Kim Finley to my left. next budget director, April Weeks, and then our benefits director, the honorable James Salmon. So glad to have the team. And I think the audience will have a number of my other employees with us as well who do a great job. Glad to have them. And again, it's my honor to present the fiscal year 2027 proposed budget for the Department of Human Resources. Let me go to the slide about our organizational structure. Again, I serve as the commissioner, along with the best assistant anyone can have. Ms. Tisa Barber is my executive assistant. Deputy Commissioner Kim Finley, who I introduced a moment ago, oversees our centers of excellence, including talent acquisition, benefits, HRIS, EAP, public safety, behavioral health, and compensation. Deputy Jennifer Hicks, who is not here today, was represented by some of our directors. She oversees all of our human resources business partners. Next, we've mentioned pending acceptance, we'll have Michael Kirkwood joining us. We have an offer out to him. He will be our deputy commissioner over regulation and compliance, an important area that includes OLR, organizational development, medical leave, and ADA and policy. Director Weeks, who I referenced a moment ago, oversees administration, finance, including budget and procurement, legislative affairs, IT, unemployment, and personnel paper processes. And last, but certainly never least, is our Director Jamar Brown. He oversees marketing and strategy, communications, and open records. And let me just say that we get tons of open records requests that he handles very well for us, as well as our social media. So that is our organizational structure and those folks that sort of my senior leadership team, they have a number of direct reports and you can see we'll report to them on the chart. So let's now talk about our accomplishments. Again, HR is very active in fiscal year 26. I will say that all of our accomplishments that I'm gonna go into in a minute touched upon all of the mayor's pillars in some form or fashion, and we're proud about that. This year focused on strengthening our workforce foundation, modernizing HR operations, and expanding employee support. Under a city of opportunity for all, again, one of the mayor's pillars, employees now receive total compensation statements. And those statements help us better understand the city's investment in them. That was an extremely heavy lift. My team did a great job in getting that out. Now our employees know about the city's investment in them and understand how competitive it is to work for the city of Atlanta when compared to other municipalities. The city also implemented phase two of the compensation adjustments to support equitable and competitive pay, talent acquisition, improved hiring processes, and workforce analytics to strengthen recruitment efforts. We enacted the We Are the City campaign, which highlighted employee engagement and the value of public service. Under One Safe City, HR resumed EAP mental health, life, and emotional support groups. We also expanded wellness programming across public safety locations, including behavioral health, access, and relaunching of the energy pods. Next slide. Continuing accomplishments in alignment with the mayor's pillars. under a city built for the future we launched the directors academy to strengthen leadership and let me say again that was that was the brainchild of the mayor and the coo and we are excited to have gotten that off the ground we had our first session last uh week at the public safety training center as well attended and we're preparing our middle managers to be the best managers that they can be, prepare them for advancement, and also delivering services both up and down the chain. HR also introduced an AI assistant feature in ATL Cloud Performance Management to help employees and managers create goals, define success criteria, and generate performance evaluation comments. Under another of the mayor's pillars, effective and ethical government, HR successfully implemented the classification and compensation study in Oracle. Again, another heavy lift that we got over the finish line. This major milestone improved consistency, transparency, and accuracy in compensation administration citywide. Oler also launched a rebrand initiative to improve employee engagement and understanding of employee relations resources. We also launched customer service satisfaction surveys and the Did You Know series, which helped improve communication and employee awareness. So next slide, so what's new and improved for fiscal year 2027? Well, we will continue modernization efforts while expanding leadership development, wellness initiatives, and workforce sustainability strategies. We are launching a workforce recruitment, modernization, and employee engagement initiative to strengthen hiring pipelines and community partnerships. Wellness efforts will expand through mental health first aid, train the trainer programs, and suicide awareness training for public safety. The Director's Academy, which I referenced earlier, will continue as well, alongside with a new ICMA Supervisory Practices Workshop focused on leadership and management development. HR is also launching a city-wide succession planning initiative to support workforce community continuity, I'm sorry, and future leadership readiness. There's also expanded random drug testing across public safety departments, and this will continue to support workplace safety and accountability. So we move from our accomplishments, and again, there were many. I'm very proud of the work we've done. Let's talk about now, position count by fund. As of February 19th, 2026, Human Resources currently operates with 165 authorized positions, 131.2 were filled, 33.8 remained vacant at that time. This reflects an approximate vacancy rate of about 20.5%, but it reflects strategic hiring delays and positions under evaluation. You should know in the upcoming personnel paper, we're going to propose abolishing 13 positions that are unfunded or no longer operationally necessary to better align staffing with operational needs and fiscal responsibility. We're also strengthening our leadership and compliance functions through the addition of a third deputy commissioner overseeing regulation and compliance. Again, we're very excited about that. Looking forward to changes that will bring to the city and our department. Next slide. So the budget slide. The fiscal year 27 proposed budget for human resources is approximately $9.9 million. This reflects a decrease of $429,236 from our fiscal year 26 adopted budget. You should know that this decrease is driven by personnel costs decreasing in the amount of $431,486. And we were able to do this through aligning resources to the appropriate funds based on employee job responsibilities and departments that they directly support. This realignment insurance personnel expenses are more accurately distributed across funds while maintaining operational support. Most operating categories remain level-funded, reflecting stable operational needs and continued fiscal discipline across the departments. You will note there's a small increase of $2,200 roughly reflected in the other cost category, and this was determined by fleet services and is associated with projected fuel and vehicle maintenance costs. We have approximately four vehicles that we have in the department. Overall, I'm happy to report that the fiscal year 2027 proposed budget supports HR's continued operations and strategic workforce initiatives while ensuring responsible financial management and proper allocation. So, ultimately this concludes our budget presentation. I want to take a moment to thank my wonderful team who's sitting up front with me and also many of the faces you might not see who work so diligently and hard behind the scenes. I'm proud of what we've accomplished. We had a very active agenda, a lot that we did over the last fiscal year. I'm proud of our team and the collaboration we have across all divisions to help move Atlanta forward. Thank you for your time, and we welcome any questions. Thank you, Commissioner Blackburn.

So we're going to start with questions. Councilmember Martin.

Yes, I was going to be first. I was watching in the back. I finally got my furniture that my colleagues had taken from me when I first started. It's a little hazing ritual. No, but in seriousness, thank you all for being here, number one. What you all do is very important to setting the tone, the morale. I know a lot of people, having been just an employee before, It's important the work that you all do people kind of see you coming and going And we pray that is mostly coming and do you think Commissioner? Thank you for your leadership into all the DC's Particularly DC Finley. Thank you as well. We just go way back one of the things that I wanted to make sure that I got an understanding of is As we think about the future of the city, as we build our workforce and another Department of Labor is coming up later or next, maybe our internship programs, you know, that is key. People like Amber Robinson and me have been here since we were babies, pups. And now we are, you know, playing critical roles in the city, myself as an elected official and Amber as a key member of the law department. How do we, while being fiscally responsible, continue to grow those kinds of opportunities so that we are bringing young people from every part of this city and making them a part of, you know, running our city and making it functional and operational? Is it anticipated in the budget is what I'm asking.

yes yes it is anticipating the budget i guess i can give a short answer to that yes good it is is it growing it was staying flat that i guess the more specific question dc family can you speak to that so in addition to the internship opportunities that we have right now we do anticipate those opportunities growing but in addition To that, we also have additional programs where we partner with local colleges, universities, and schools for something that's happening this upcoming fall is a student civic leadership program where we're partnering with six high schools for individuals to come and shadow some City of Atlanta employees. We're actually asking for mentors. We'll probably be becoming a useful mentor. So we have different options and programs in addition to paid internships that will allow City of Atlanta constituents and young people to have access to those opportunities.

I THINK I'M EXCITED ABOUT THAT. I THINK PHILOSOPHICALLY WE ALL AGREE THAT YOUNG PEOPLE NEED TO HAVE OPPORTUNITY. BUT AS WE THINK ABOUT COUNCILMEMBER JUAN AND THE SHORTAGES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT IN SOME OF OUR KEY DEPARTMENTS WHERE THEY'RE PLAYING KEY ROLES IN BUILDING INSPECTIONS AND ZONING, THERE ARE YOUNG PEOPLE THAT CAN BE TRAINED. THOSE SKILLS ARE VERY NUANCED BUT THEY DON'T TAKE A LONG TIME TO DEVELOP THOSE SKILLS. YOU DON'T HAVE TO HAVE 20 years of experience to be a building inspector. You just got to be passionate about it and be attentive to the learning process. And so I think that's an opportunity for us.

Absolutely. And the reintroduction, reintroduction of apprenticeship program. Yes. That's something that we're talking with and being in partnership with departments as far as making sure we're maintaining and establishing and creating those pipelines. for young people to get access to those types of roles.

Fantastic. Is the same true for our public safety departments, fire, police, corrections, same is happening?

Correct. So for the fire department, we have a cadet program. For the fire, APD, we have a similar type program, but yes, it's very similar.

That is great to hear. And the last question is, is there one of those schools, the six mentor schools?

Yes.

Fantastic. Thank you so much, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Commissioner and team. All right. Thank you.

Council Member Bakhtiari.

Thank you. Sounds so hesitant. No, thank you guys for being here. I had a question about the comprehensive reclassification and compensation structure. that we did in June of last year, correct? Yes. The new classification titles and pay grades were to be incorporated into Oracle I think by October of last year? It was December. December of last year? I stand corrected. Thank you. But my understanding is eight months, well, eight months after requirement or I guess you want to correct me however many months we are after that requirement I'm at least still hearing from our unions and I think some of my colleagues have as well of repeated cases where employees in various departments are performing the same duties and functions but pay is inconsistent so I was curious how the budget is ensuring equal pay for equal work

So we do have a process in place where we do look at compression issues and of course it goes through a review process with VRB or the personnel paper. So we do have a process in place and when department leadership is reaching out wanting us to look at certain areas we are doing that.

Okay. And then another piece I've been hearing from everybody from a lot of the departments is that retention is a major problem. I think we're seeing as I've cited many times during the budget conversations today, burnout. And for our tenured employees with service in excess of 10 years, does this budget account for their longevity bonuses?

You want to speak to that?

so councilmember bacteria how are you um so as far as longevity um that conversation will have to actually actually have to have that with the department of finance we do know that it's in code um for the longevity but i do think it's based off of if the budget can allow allow that or not so um that's a conversation that we'll have to have with the department of finance okay um any idea of turn around on that conversation yes uh we um have had that that communication

position of the finance, position of the HR over the years about longevity bonuses or bonuses in general. We have worked and discussed with the law department. There are some considerations with regards to the state of Georgia's gratuities clause that you cannot be compensated simply for just being here. Something has to happen. So there's ways of maybe building in an incentive structure that is performance based and not just time serve based. We haven't come up with a final kind of determination, but we need to make sure that we are in compliance with state law when it comes to bonuses.

Thank you, CFO, I appreciate that. And look forward to hearing back from those. And also don't expect them to happen before we adopt the budget, so I get it. But obviously we've also been talking a lot about cost of living increases, I think we all know that due to a certain leader's fragility, we're all dealing with excess gas prices and other things. But cost of living adjustments in recent budgets, inflation wiping out wage gains, will our workforce receive a cost of living adjustment in FY27?

Yeah, that's something we have to defer to finance as well.

Oh, Bala, it's you again.

Yes, there is not a cost of living adjustment in this budget. As mentioned before, the budget has to be balanced and there is not capacity in this budget, in this environment, in this economic times to have a cost of living adjustment that will not yield another action of possibly a reduction in force to compensate for any COLA considerations. So these are without have to have the balanced budget at the end of the day.

So in simpler terms that changing that could have unintended repercussions on other... Exactly. Got it. Is there a chance that this could be revisited later in the year when we might have a better understanding of what our Financial climate is. Oh, absolutely.

And we have done that in the past. I believe it was the Merlandi correctly from wrong, but it was the 25 and a 24 budget where we where we went into the budget cycle with the one and a half cola ended up doing three and a half, I think. three and a half three and a half yeah so we did that mid-year when um when there was a more optimistic um economic climate and so would love to be in that position again where we have opportunities to make uh decisions like that again but we are also have to be mindful of where economic conditions are heading I will say that while we're hopeful and optimistic that that could happen, we can also have to be ready for the inverse of something else happening and more tightening, less revenue, a more downside. if you will, that might yield in more actions that might be needed. These are things that other municipalities are dealing with right now that fortunately we're not dealing with. If you look in the business climate right now, there is a high degree of workforce displacements that are happening. There is reductions in force happening in many of the largest organizations in the country right now. And they just they're all in the headlines.

And Councilman Bakhtiar, if I could jump in, I think that's why what we did with the total compensation statements is so important. It's not just about looking at what the salary is or the COLA. Yes, we want our employees to be well paid, but the total compensation statements helps them understand dollar for dollar, benefit to benefit, just how competitive their job is here at the city compared to other municipalities. And we think the total compensation statement should bring that value and help them understand that.

Thank you. I had an additional question, but it slipped my mind. But don't worry, I will not hesitate to circle back around and ask to speak again. Thank you, guys.

Thank you. Council Member Warren. I'll be quick. I know that y'all are presenting that personnel paper on Thursday, and I'm sure you've heard a lot of conversation around it. When do you think we'll be able to get a preview of that? And the second question is, there's been a lot of question from me, admittedly, about split-funded positions. And so I'm hoping that... Y'all provide a summary of all the different actions. But if there is a way to also highlight or help me be able to find those split funded position actions in this paper, that would be helpful. So go ahead.

Yes. The personnel paper is imminent. We're still waiting on some information from a couple of departments. And once we have that updated information, we'll have that over to you. And we suspect that issue will address those issues as far as split funding and all, as well as abolishments. We're looking forward to those. I know that's what we're focused on, so we're looking forward to having a significant number of abolishments.

Okay. I will likely be, while I definitely want to see, I'm looking forward to seeing abolishments in the paper. I don't want us to abolish just for the sake of abolishing, so there may be questions along the way in terms of, the rationale behind them. You know, if it's a vacant position that hasn't been filled in five years, we need to abolish it. But, you know, it is there for a strategic reason. I just want to make sure the pendulum doesn't swing too far in either direction on that. But I look forward to Thursday.

Yes, sir. We use a very rational basis for looking at abolishments. And to your point, you forecasted some of its positions been open two or three years. Clearly, you probably don't need it. And so that's one of the bases we've been using to eliminate positions amongst others. Very good. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Norwood.

I have a resolution that talks about the charter mandated functions versus the executive offices and things that are great to have, but not essential to have. And I think we need to look at abolishments the same way. I mean, we've just looked at three departments that we really rely on. Transportation, city planning, and parks. That's what we rely on. Y'all are great, but we don't rely on you except to make sure our group insurance is okay. So, you know, I got that. I got that. But the point is, we need to be very thoughtful because If we are making tough decisions with this budget, and I am delighted we have a CFO who really understands we got to balance this. As far as abolishments, for heaven's sakes, if we got some vacancies that right now we know we need to fill in a department that comes out and does the work and are the frontline people. do not let them get caught up in some we got to do a riff you know kind of across the board same way with giving people appropriate compensations um i ran seven radio stations we were in hard times we turned it around and made a lot of money for my boss uh i didn't make money but he did and um but i worked like very hard like we all do here but the point is we had a um plan that the more you made, the greater the bonus was. And so the general managers were going to get these huge bonuses and the guys that were on the air from midnight to six were going to get almost nothing. And I said, we're going to just completely redo it. We are going to give everybody the same amount so that the people that were the front line on the air from midnight to six got something that was very significant to them, and the manager already was running the station and making a good salary. So sometimes you just need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and I know we're government, I know it's different, but I want us to think through who are those essential employees, whether it's our code enforcement officers, whether it's whatever it is that we need them out there doing the work for us. We need them showing up to check on the permitting. We need those things done. So please help us. Y'all are the department that puts all this into motion, so I look to y'all to make that happen.

Thank you, Council Member Norwood. And let me just say, add it on as far as the VRB, which I guess nobody likes to hear about sometimes, but we focus on that a lot. And when we're deciding about raises or position elimination, the essential nature of positions that we need, and particularly we focus a lot on trying to make sure we have the boots on the ground, folks. We'll probably compensate it in all the departments. So we're aligned.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

We've got a follow-up from Council Member Bechtar.

I remembered. Well, one thing that struck me when Council Member Juan was talking about the personnel paper, I remember PACE being in here and other unions, and they mentioned something of they didn't know, they hadn't gotten the personnel paper, so they didn't know who was classified, what jobs were classified as what. Has there been communication with them? I know that they've been waiting for some time now for that paper.

Well, we did send out a citywide communication outlining what's classified and unclassified, but we can reach out to them personally with that.

I have a feeling that might be the best use of everyone's time.

Yeah, I meet with them routinely, the unions, and enjoy and respect and appreciate my relationship with them, and I'll make sure that we resend the information to them in our meetings. I'll make sure they have it.

Thank you. I appreciate you guys. And I suppose the last thing that I wanted to say was something that CFO brought up. Understanding the, and to you all, understanding the difficulty of the climate right now and balancing of the budget and knowing that we have a deep bench for finance to help us do that, to which I'm very grateful. suppose though I know that we're going to have difficult conversations throughout this year and that we don't know what one week to the next will look like and I just hope that as we talk about undoubtedly tightening budgets again that we take a look at not punishing our departmental folks the ones who actually do the work of making things run I think we can all agree that there's a lot of top heaviness in aspects and departments in the city and I would hope that as we look to make changes, that we don't punish the people that are on the ground putting in the hours doing that work. And that we instead take a look at ourselves and think, what can we sacrifice for the greater good of the city? So just wanted to make that point and say thank you guys again. Thank you.

All right. Thank you. Question from me. Help me understand how this department has a vacancy rate at almost 22% if my math is correct in the general fund.

Well, it's... Well, go ahead.

That's actually all funds. So our vacancy rate, it covers all of our funds where all of our positions are funded out of. So that's for everything.

All right. Because on page number six, it shows that the general fund has it at 19th position.

Well, I will say that since this was done back in February 19th, we've actually hired seven people. Okay. So our vacancy rate is going down. All of our positions going into FY27 are funded, even our vacancies. Okay. we will ramp up our hiring and hopefully we'll be fully staffed.

And are these mostly new positions or are you filling vacancies?

These are backfields, so vacancies, yes. So we have not created anything new.

Any other questions from colleagues? Seeing none, thank you all so much for your presentation. We will make a quick transition to our last budget briefing for the day, which is the Department of Labor. Thank you all.

. . Bye.

Thank you.

All right, we're going to go ahead and get started and welcome the Department of Labor. We have Commissioner Austin Gibbons here. If you don't mind introducing your team and then getting started with your presentation.

Okay, good afternoon and thank you for the opportunity to present today the Atlanta Department of Labor and Employment Services. As stated, I am Commissioner Dr. Theresa Austin Gibbons. Today I have with me to my left is our Labor Liaison Officer, Ms. Embry, our Deputy Commissioner, Ms. Sonya Wilson-Westmoreland, and our Senior Accounting Manager to my right, Ms. Alma Tillman. We will briefly walk you through our organizational structure, key accomplishments for FY26, our FY27 strategic priorities, and the proposed budget investments needed to continue delivering measurable and impact for the residents of the city of Atlanta.

Yes, next slide, please.

Oh, you got it. Okay, organization. That's it. This slide outlines the FY27 organizational structure for ADALS. Our structure is intentionally designed to align operational effectiveness with service delivery and accountability. The department is organized around key operational areas such as workforce services, signature programs, business services, labor and innovation, and our administrative services. Each division plays a critical role in ensuring the residents receive access to workforce training, employment opportunities, labor rights education, and employer-connected pathways. Our leadership structure also supports strong cross-functional collaboration, compliance oversight, and data-informed decision-making and enhanced customer service. At the top, you will see myself as the commissioner and my executive assistant, Rache Brooks, as well as the people here on the podium with me today in their respective areas. In FY26, Adalls continued to build a momentum by expanding access to workforce services, strengthening employer partnerships, and creating pathways to economic mobility to Atlanta residents. Each leader today will assist in speaking in their unit's contribution. to Adalls and how it translates into services under Mayor Dickens Pillars. One safe city and effective and ethical government, a city of opportunity for all, and a city built for the future. Next, I will pass it over to Ms. Embry, our Labor Liaison Officer.

Thank you, Commissioner, and good afternoon, Council. To begin, I'll address Pillars, one safe city and effective and ethical government. Under the leadership of Atlanta Fire and Rescue Department, Captain Cheryl Chapman, we co-facilitated the development of the department's five-year strategic plan for fiscal years 2027 through 2031. We engaged internal and external stakeholders to strengthen public safety, enhance organizational accountability, and by leveraging existing talent within the city, this internal collaboration resulted in an estimated cost savings of $100,000, including consultant fees. And so just to note a few of the internal and external stakeholders that were with us, we have internally AFRD Deputy Chief Macklemore. We also had the Mayor's Office of Innovation Delivery and Performance Director Symetria Epps. delivering best practices related to tracking and creating effective KPIs. And then also we had PACE, Progressive Firefighters and International Association of Firefighters, IAFF unions at the table as well. And externally, we had MPU leaders and chairs and other community members. I will now turn it over to DC Wilson Westmoreland.

Thank you, Ms. Embry. Good day, council members. Under a city of opportunity for all pillars, we have served 2,868 Atlanta residents through the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act programs. We have issued over $1.35 million with the WIOA training funds. We have also served 1,946 residents who were placed in jobs in partnership with TCSG Wagner-Peyser program.

Now I'm gonna turn it over to Ms. Amber.

Oh, sure, Commissioner.

Thank you, Ms. Wilson-Westmoreland. As you can see, we also facilitated another successful summer youth employment program last year, serving 5,944 youth across the city. Additionally, the city invested $4.4 million in youth salaries while participants collectively completed over 245,000 verified work hours. In partnership with Annie E. Casey, we served 135 youth between the ages of 18 and 24 with career readiness boot camps with Atlanta Center for Self-Sufficiency. And 40 of those individuals now have obtained and been hired throughout the city of Atlanta with employers in permanent employment. This program continues to demonstrate what we and how we invest in our young people. We create safer communities, stronger workforce pipelines, and a greater economic opportunity. I will now turn it back over to Ms. Embry to discuss workers' rights, meetings, and other workshops that she has obtained.

Yes, and so under that same pillar, a city of opportunity for all, we contributed to developing the workers' rights section of the FIFA 2026 Human Rights Plan, working with the Georgia AFL-CIO Office and its coalition of community interest groups. So we also facilitate monthly virtual labor rights sessions for all city of Atlanta residents. These sessions are held every third Wednesday of the month via Zoom. We include a subject area expert speaker, such as in the past we've had Dr. Tina Foster-Dungo, Esquire, We've also had former State House Representative William Bodie and also community activist Mr. Michael McClure. We have discussed topics such as misclassification, fair labor practices, workplace safety and workers' compensation and much more. And so tomorrow we actually will host our session and we will discuss advocacy and how to advocate for your rights successfully. And then we've also partnered with Ms. Valerie Mills within the Office of International and Immigrant Affairs to provide labor rights education to limited English proficient residents. And back to you, Commissioner.

Thank you, Ms. Emery. As you can see, we've been very busy. Under the pillar of a city built for the future, we've expanded our employer engagement efforts by hosting seven career fairs throughout this year. We've also partnered and hosted 10 career fairs that brought in about 219 employers and hundreds of job seekers, creating direct interactions and connections to employment opportunities, career advisement, and workforce resources. By partnering with Showcase Atlanta to host the Showcase Atlanta Workforce Expo at the Georgia World Congress Center, 118 vendors employers were available for 1800 plus career seekers. Today, the Georgia World Congress Center has successfully onboarded 30 plus Atlantans from this event. Our continued focus is ensuring that Atlanta residents are connected to industries that are growing and creating sustainable wages. So what's new and improved? As we look ahead to FY27, the department is focused on strategic growth and innovation. First, through our partnership with the Author in Blank Family Foundation, we will provide employment and training services to 100 residents in the Vine City and English Avenue communities. This initiative reflects our commitment to equitable economic development and neighborhood revitalization. Ms. Emery.

Yes. And so with that, we will also aim to improve our labor rights education program. The intended goal of strengthening this program is to expand our reach and ensure that more residents, both employee and employer alike, have access to comprehensive labor rights education. while increasing participation. We have begun implementing our multilingual education strategy through the collaboration with the Office of International and Immigrant Affairs.

Late FY26, early 27, we're launching the new apprenticeship initiative, focused on connecting participants to labor unions and industries with active apprenticeship opportunities, particularly in green jobs and green job adjacents, such as solar power, construction, and EV. We also will begin an initiative to increase local business engagement by partnering with local business associations, NPUs, and hosting business mixers. Finally, we will work towards completing the procurement process and launch the Mayor's Youth Leadership Institute focused on essential leadership skills, mentorship, and hands-on exposure to government operations. These initiatives position ADALS to better prepare residents for the future workforce while supporting the city's long-term economic development strategy. For the FY27 proposed general fund budget, I will now turn it over to Ms. Tillman.

Thank you, Commissioner. Our FTE for 2027 is 8.18. No, we are not split funding people. We are split funding dollars. So our 0.18 is equivalent to the fact that we have five positions that are 100% funded by general funds and our other 3.18 is split funded between our trust fund and our federal funds. And then our final slide for our financial portion just reiterates our FY27 budget and our FY26 budget, and that difference is the $55,523. The only note I'll make on here, if you have questions, that's fine, but the only other note I'll make on here is on our purchase contracted services line. That is basically everything other than our salaries and our supplies and capital. So that's our contract labor, memberships, travel, and those type of expenses. But overall, our increase of the $55,000 is due to the cost of doing business, you know, increase in personnel insurance expense, as well as pensions and things like that, that we have increased over the years.

As you can see, our staffing remains strategically aligned to support both operational effectiveness and compliance requirements. We remain focused on ensuring staffing resources are aligned with performance outcomes, fiscal stewardship and service delivery priorities. Maintaining a strong workforce infrastructure is essential to ensuring that residents receive timely and high quality service. In closing, a dolls remain committed to advancing the workforce, excellence, economic mobility and equitable access to opportunity across the city of Atlanta. We appreciate the continued support of the mayor's office, City Council and our workforce partners, employers and community stakeholders. At this time we will take questions.

Thank you. We'll start with questions from colleagues. Councilmember Martin.

Thank you all so much for being here to commissioner and your team. I don't know if you remember when we first met last year when I was a candidate at the, I think it was the Rice Center and the young people that were in the program, they were presenting their final projects and how amazing was that experience for me. As a young person that came through similar programs, and HR just left, I'm not sure if y'all were in the room yet, and I was talking about how we take those kinds of programs and grow young people into becoming employees of the city of Atlanta, where we can get them into skilled labor roles. And so it's more of a comment than anything, but certainly I would love to hear your reaction to the I hope we're having that kind of coordination with the Department of Human Resources and the department. We're looking for eight zoning inspectors right now, for example. That's not a job that requires a master's degree or advanced degree. I THINK THAT'S A JOB THAT A KID AT WASHINGTON HIGH SCHOOL THAT MAYBE DOESN'T WANT TO GO TO COLLEGE OR MAYBE THEY WANT TO BE PART TIME IN COLLEGE AND BE AN INSPECTOR. I JUST WANT TO KNOW WHAT KIND OF COORDINATION IS HAPPENING. I FEEL LIKE IT'S HAPPENING. BUT AS A NEW COUNCIL MEMBER, I WOULD LOVE TO GET MORE INSIGHT ON THAT. AND ALSO GOOD TO SEE YOU, JIMENA, AS ALWAYS. BUT IS THAT COORDINATION HAPPENING? IS THERE SOMETHING WE CAN DO TO ENHANCE IT, TO MAKE IT MORE STRONG? WHAT CAN WE DO AS COUNCIL MEMBERS TO HELP WITH THAT? I THINK THAT'S THE QUESTION.

Yes. So we are coordinating with HR, our business service manager, Mr. Russell Hall, has connected with the HR department on those critical hard-to-fill positions, and so we are working on a plan currently.

Fantastic. Well, I look forward to, I guess the committee of purview for you all would be CDHS, or is it finance? It might be finance. Whichever one it is.

CDHS.

I would love to, CDHS, I would love to come and, you know, hear about the progress that's being made there, because We got so many talented young people. I think you all are passionate about what you do. And bringing that together can make us a stronger city. So I appreciate it. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Council Member Norwood.

Yes. I have a request for y'all. I think that the first five pages of this are very good. And I think that unless my colleagues are a lot more aware of exactly what y'all have done than I am, I think they don't know. So my request is that you make copies of this and have a staff member put them in each council person's office. Because I am seeing a lot of work from very few people. And it's refreshing. And it's about our youth and that we're all concerned about. So I think you could... do yourself a great day's service. That's kind of a weird name that y'all have to use. So I think if you just did a printed copy for each council member, it would be helpful as we are looking at what we've accomplished this year. So congratulations. Thank you.

All right. Thank you. And one question I just wanted to get answered is, in the past you've relied on a grant, but I know that grant has gone away. Is there a possibility of any other future grants? Can you just walk us through that?

We still have our grant funding for WIOA. That's the Workforce Innovation Opportunity Act. And I'm going to yield to our senior fiscal manager and let her speak to our grants.

So we currently receive federal funding from U.S. Department of Labor, and it is usually about 45 percent of our total income. And the other like 41 percent is city of Atlanta. And then 11 percent is our non-federal like philanthropic money.

That's the only question. I just wanted some clarity on that. And seeing that we don't have any other colleagues in the room, so you all get to get off easy today and get your time back. And colleagues, we finish right at 3 o'clock, just like the schedule says. So appreciate you all for coming in today.

Thank you.

For tomorrow, colleagues, we're going to kick things back off in the morning with budget hearing briefings. We have the Department of Public Works at 10 a.m., followed by Invest Atlanta at 11. And then for the afternoon session, we'll have the Department of Aviation at 1 p.m. and the Department of Grants and Community Development at 2. And for our viewing public, don't forget, tomorrow evening we have our public hearing for tax millage rate. which will be uh at 6 p.m and then followed by our budget public hearing which will be at 6 15 tomorrow evening uh with that we are adjourned for the day thank you thank you chair winston