Finance Committee - Regular Meeting

Thousand twenty six. At this time, we'll start with the roll call. Honorable woman O'Neil?

Present.

Alderman Thorpe? Present. And I am here. Is there a motion to approve the agenda as written?

So moved. Second.

All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Is motion carries. Is there a motion to approve the minutes from our last meeting?

So moved. Second.

All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. With that, mister Flinner, it's all you. Miss Jackson, would you put time on the clock?

Excellent. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for having me. It's a honor to be here before you once again. As we were just chatting. The first time I sat here was a year ago, two weeks in at the city of Annapolis. So it's a great feeling to be here speaking to the first budget that I've created after a little over a year with the city. I've watched all the budget hearings prior to this one and I noticed central services came up a lot. Really looking forward to clarifying your questions and help kind of detangle what's centralized, what's getting decentralized. And with that, I have our slideshow ready to go for you all and we will jump right in.

For starters, if I could just speak broadly about our accomplishments, a big thing that I'm proud of in our first year as a new city department is laying the foundation that a new city department can be built upon. And I you know, when I look at these accomplishments at face value, I think, well, that that's really nothing overly overwhelming as it is. But to kinda set the stage for you, when I started with the city, we had six vacant positions, was about 33% of my department. We've been working, and by we, I mean I've been working very hard, to fill all of those positions and we've been successful in doing so. In fact, our new fleet manager and our fleet analyst, our final round of interviews for those positions are this Thursday.

They will be starting hopefully next month. So filling, the gaps on our workforce was a big goal of mine right out of the gate and, we have done that. And we now, once, we hire our last two positions, we won't have any vacancies in our department which puts us in a good position to ask you all for extra positions which we will fill right away. Two other things that we're very very proud of, we moved our entire office into one new work site. We were spread out in six different buildings.

I had an office over in Hudson Street. The department wasn't together as a department. And so in September, we all consolidated into 25 Shaw Street, got everybody moved, and we now occupy the 1st Floor of that building and we're working on a CIP project at that building right now with plans to bring finance over hopefully in the next year. And then lastly, a lot of process, a lot of workflow, a lot of reviewing, analyzing, and kind of improving the work we do each and every day. And that last bullet, I know it lists several, several accomplishments, but big things to hit on Talking to the other departments to determine our roles and responsibilities and what central services manages versus what DPW manages versus what Rec and Park manages was a multi month effort but really helped us work more productively together.

Additionally, we're modernizing how we bill other departments for fleet in fiscal year twenty seven and I'm happy to describe more of that to you. And then we've been looking at our most critical facility work orders and repairing those and reducing our procurement timelines wherever we can. Moving on to our performance measures, I know when one looks at this page they see a lot of blanks and I'm happy to share more details about that but we'll start at the top. So work orders is our facility management team. That one, goal pretty much measures everything that team of five individuals does in the course of a year.

To kind of break that down for you, we have two crews on our facility team. We have over 20 facilities and there are about two hundred and twenty business days in a year. So as you can see doing about 632 work orders, that's give or take about three a day. By the end of the year, we should have about 850 at the pace going now, which shows a pretty substantial amount of work that a very small crew does to keep all of our employees productive and make sure their workspaces are comfortable, they're welcoming, and suitable for all the work that we do here in the city. The next two are our engineering goals which, I welcome feedback on.

The two goals, for our facility engineer Donovan Harrell are finish all projects on time, finish all projects on budget. That's a very hard measure to measure when we don't have a system or a very clear way of knowing what that timeline or what that budget should be at the project inception. So Donovan and I and I welcome to work with the new administration. Hopefully by the time we speak to you next year, we have more measurable goals that specifically relate to the work we do in facility engineering to show our success in that space. Another one, procurement is next.

These are timelines for all of our different procurement types. As you can see this year, those days are much, much higher than our goal. And that data is a little deceiving. Something that I'm working on with my procurement team right now, we have shrunk procurement timelines on the things we can control. We're actually getting ready to put 10 new solicitations out on the street that our two buyers have helped write, which will almost triple that team's output.

However, the days, something that we're running into a lot is we lose a lot of time in procurement when questions are sitting in departments. Or when we have solicitations posted and the vendors come back and ask us questions and we have to get answers to those questions from the department and share them with all vendors. Sometimes that is a multi month process which drags out our timeline. Other things that I've noticed that, hopefully will will initiate some process improvements to correct is, things start in procurement long before, they should move to procurement. For example, I think we have a project right now where we're expanding a trail network and I think technically it's with procurement, but, we don't have easements for all the real estate we need to build that trail network.

So we can't build that solicitation until we have the easements. And so kind of resetting the whole city on what is the process, what groundwork do the departments need to do before something officially moves over to a procurement workflow, and then we can accurately track these timelines and hold our team accountable for those very short windows that things are stuck with the procurement team. Lastly, these are my fleet and risk goals. The reason why you don't see any fleet data is we are in the middle of a fleet modernization project right now and our fleet manager and our fleet analyst has never been here, but our fleet manager retired in December. And so right now we're without both, ahead of our fleet team and, without a system to pull this data ourselves.

The good news is once I do hire our new fleet manager, our new system, dossier version seven is just waiting in the wings. That'll go live, and we'll have new fleet data that we can share at any time. And we're also gonna take a a new fresh look at data quality there, making sure that, all of that is a 100% accurate. And then lastly with risk, these are workers' comp claims. Nothing major to report out here.

Everything is on pace with what we've historically done. Now moving ahead, I wanted to kind of show you some things that I am very focused on in the next year. As I've said before, we're still trying to build that foundation that really central services needs to truly excel. Two big things that we've been working on is working with ITS on the munis workflows that we need to actually manage the budget that you all give us. We were very happy to see in April, me and all of my direct reports got workflow access in Munis so we can both enter and approve our own invoices.

But something that we still need to do to have a 100% control of our budget is we need to, create new workflows for the CIP projects which are all technically assigned to DPW right now. I know budget and the ITS team have said that they're hoping to have that done at the start of the new fiscal year, and, we wish them a lot of success. We can't wait for that to go online. Once we do have all of our munis access, then we can really kinda start, hard charging on other areas that we need to address. So we don't have any policies in central services right now.

I have a fleet policy in draft that we're getting ready to socialize with the office of law and the city manager. And then my next policies that we plan on drafting is facility use policy and a sustainable procurement policy, and that's in partnership with the Office of Resilience and Sustainability. I mentioned before our fleet software modernization project which is coming next year, and then we hope to launch brand new risk mitigation training, and we hope to host fire drills in every one of our facilities next year to start making sure we have plans and processes in place to keep our employees safe each and every day. Moving on to enhancements. I'll tell you I'm sure the budget team wasn't happy with me when they got my submission because I think I had 80 enhancements when I sent it in December, which I understand to be quite a lot.

Now admittedly, I was brand new. I was trying to cover gaps in our budget and I was encouraged to go ahead and ask for it if we thought we needed it. And that's kind of why my budget looks so expansive I think compared to some of the other departments. So these are the the positions we asked for. Going down the list really, really quick.

A deputy director. I was very surprised to see, after a few months here that nearly every other department in the city has a director. 10 of the other 12. The only department that also doesn't have a deputy is ITS. And I am doing well, running a department, you know, being a manager to my team, hiring staff, working on policy, and doing a lot of these workflows on my own and having a deputy director working with me and and really just supporting our department leadership would really double my outputs and and make a huge impact on on our department.

Real estate administrator, if I can just park here for a moment, is probably the most critical, unfilled or even unassigned position in our city based on, my observations in one year. We have 30 active leases right now as a city. I have two pending real estate transfers, waiting in my queue. We have no one to manage those workflows. We have no individual in the city today that is doing city real estate.

If you look at other governments, general services or central services department, a big part of that department is the real estate team. They would manage rent checks and make sure that all of our tenants are submitting the rent payments on time. We would have timely follow ups with them if they did not. We also have a lot of annual reporting requirements in our leases that, it's very hard for us to keep track of because currently right now Ashley Leonard in the office of law and I are both dedicating what isn't our full time real job to real estate and it's really falling to the back burner. And I think you see it and I see it.

And I think that's really the biggest gap that we have in central services today. And then the third position that I also think is our biggest need is a contract administrator. I was shocked to find out in central services, we probably process more or I'll say safely we're probably in the top three of invoices for department. We're buying parts for vehicles all day every day. We have countless vendors to work on HVAC, plumbing, woodwork, painting, carpet.

We have countless vendors. We have countless invoices and we have countless contracts and we have nobody to manage that. In fact, when we were created in fiscal year twenty seven, we, moved an admin assistant over from, another department at that time, which actually gave us our only administrative support staff. So I would love to have a contract administrator on the team to manage the vast quantity of contracts that we have, hold our contractors accountable when they don't perform their work to the quality we expect, and that would really support the facility team and give them the time and the bandwidth to go out and actually make repairs and not sit at their desk in their office and try to make sense of procurement documents, invoices, contracts, and the like. Three positions that we did get in this budget cycle which were not in our top priorities, they were kind of at the lower half of the list, were our engineer two that would support our other facility or other facility excuse me, facility engineer.

So we would take our engineering team from one to two which would virtually double our facility engineering outputs. We also asked for a fleet parts specialist. We have a huge part store room in our fleet shop. Currently no one is manning that. I feel we're losing a ton of efficiency by having guys out of the shop ordering parts, going to pick up parts and a kind of a overarching better process, better accountability there, more proactive part ordering, I think can save a lot of downtime and free up time for our technicians to make the repairs on our vehicles that we need.

We do have a fleet maintenance technician on there, so that would take our facility team from five to six folks. And then we have a risk management specialist on there to support our risk manager that is also a team of one. The reason why you heard me say before, risk training and fire drills would be a big thing we want to come in '27. Our risk manager today really manages our insurance program, our workers' compensation claims, and has to go out and do testing and big risk mitigation work. And we sought a number two in that team to take over the smaller, lesser important things.

Training, facility monitoring to proactively catch potential risks before they create harm. And then fire drills, making sure first aid cabinets were equipped. Those very very basic things that are really important to keep our staff and our visitors safe would all fall to that individual. Then non personnel enhancements, just flying through this, some big things you've probably heard me say already, our facilities aren't in great shape and a lot of what we try to do in this budget address that. We've made some increases in the facility management budget.

Last year we identified, believe it or not, facility management was getting less than half of the city's total building repair and maintenance budget. We were getting two ninety seven of the six zero seven the city was distributing to departments. I believe the budget team, helped us, make sense of that and move some of that around. Is that my time?

That's your time. Can we try and wrap it up for the next two minutes? Absolutely.

We're adding to facility CIP projects and we also centralized a bunch of workflows which I know you'll ask me about. So we can talk about that more later. Some budget trends really, really quickly. My central services budget has bounced all over the place a little bit, but happy to answer questions about that. We can explain the rises there.

Central purchasing is really a good standard budget of one that isn't volatile on my team. This is a team of three. They perform administrative work but they don't buy a lot of goods or services on behalf of the other departments. Budget here. Soil management is another one that is drastically altered versus years past.

We can speak to that in more detail. But here you see over a million dollar increase in '27. Fleet operations also has stayed pretty constant. This is from the enterprise fund, so the other departments pay into this and then we spend the money they give us to repair their vehicles And that has stayed pretty constant because our fleet size has stayed pretty constant over the past few years. And then replacement, something that I'd also like to speak with you about more detail is something that has swung wildly.

Last year we got 188,000. This coming year we're getting 916,000. We have 400 vehicles in our fleet. We should be replacing 40 a year if our goal is to have vehicles for ten years and the funding isn't there to do that. And then really really quick, just on a closing note, know we're asking a lot this year and so I wanted to make a promise to the city that any vacant positions we get through the budget process, we will fill them.

We we don't believe philosophically in asking for positions and then having them sit vacant and and moving that money to other places. I'll also tell you that all the money we're given and for the different things we're requesting it for, we will spend it in those areas or we'll return it to the general fund. And then, we're also, anything that we don't spend or if we're off on our guesses and what we need because these are our best estimates, we'll return that at the general fund. And I I offered to the budget team starting in December for that 50% burn rate through our budget, we'll start talking about moving funds back over. And then two long long term questions that I'm gonna need the administration's help with, which you've heard me mention today.

What are our long term as a city? What are our long term real estate plans, facility plans? Where are we moving folks? That tells me what we're doing with rents, leases. Some of these workflows are are years in the making. A building a new facility is a five year process. So, these are very strategic questions that need strategic answers so we can make the tech. And then also with fleet replacement, I'll be giving you a policy very soon. We might wanna look at how many vehicles we have in our fleet. We might wanna look at take home vehicles, because that could be a good way to reduce our budget and lower our our repair maintenance expenses there. Thank you for your time. That's all that I have to share today.

Thanks very much. Yeah. I agree with your last point there. So you ended on a high note for me. Alderman O'Neill, wanna start us off with some questions?

Thank you very much.

Oh, and before you do, let me just say, mister Flinner, you're in kind of a unique position where we're asking you to answer questions about all these different departments. So just feel free if I ask you, you know, why is there this much for police under central services to say better off to have the police answer that?

I asked for it, so I should be able to speak for it.

Okay. That was gonna be one of my first questions. So last week after talking with six departments already, a lot of departments are talking about their budgets and some of the things that have moved from their budgets into central services. And do we have a mechanism by which we can see the, you know, one spreadsheet where it's moved from one budget and where it is, how it's increasing central services budget? Yes. Alright. That's something I can do on myself or it's a report that you can?

I can share it with everyone.

Thank you. That would be really helpful. So I know a lot of our questions revolved around that. I love the fact that you're filling in gaps and I was going to say before you started to say, you know, two years ago this department didn't exist. So when we start talking about the lack of personnel in your departments, it's I would say a learning curve for us to rebuild the department where it was fifteen years ago before it was taken apart.

So I appreciate that. My one question was about the positions that you had funded versus the ones that you didn't have funded. If you had to go back, were there any of the positions that were funded that you would swap out, for the ones that were not?

Absolutely. And I I would even say, if I would give back the three that we got, I would take two instead and I would give some of that back if I was being asked to make cuts. I only say that because the three we're receiving are supporting teams that are already staffed. There's already at least one person there to perform that work. The top two which would be real estate or the deputy director or the top three which would be real estate deputy director and a contract administrator, those are gaps where we don't have anybody filling that role.

And I I think those would make a huge difference on the quantity and the quality of work we perform every day. So I would say I I would give three back and I would take the top two if that was an option available to me.

I will jump in to say that there is, dollars 100,000 in the budget for a real estate manager as a contract. So so that that was the trade off that was made there. You may feel differently about that, but but that's that's the swap that's there.

Thank you. I forgot about that. We do have a 100,000 there. The challenge is that would also fund real estate workflows, the the cost of getting an appraisal, the cost of getting a survey, the cost of of title and deed. That's the only real estate budget anywhere is a 100,000 which would cover either a consultant or like a fractional real estate person and the workflows that we need to fund.

If I can just jump in. Is this another case where it says consultant but it means consultants with an not $100,000 for one position. It's for potentially a couple different contracts?

Correct. And there is no one consultant right now today. It we would go out and find that next next year.

Alright. Jump.

No. That's okay. Can we talk a little bit about the real estate? You said through 30 active real estate properties. Leases. Leases that the city has with other organizations. Okay. And you're looking for more? You're looking just to have somebody head that up because that's currently falling falling under your position?

The the challenge with real estate and and you would think some of our leases where we'd sign it, we wouldn't have to think about it again for twenty years. But a lot of our leases are more evergreen than than once in a blue moon. And a great example of that is the boat show, which we just had. Those are two leases every fall, every spring, and we're currently changing them every boat show to work around city dock construction and other considerations. I know market space is something else that has arisen.

We're examining that lease. We had just spent last year renegotiating that lease. So some of these leases are coming up every year and then stop what we're doing, go address these workflows, come council about the real estate and then go back to our day jobs, what I'm calling it. So the challenge there is the the the work that needs to happen to get those leases repackaged, reput together, have the negotiations. There's the rent payments, so the annual reporting, and then new things to acquire or dispose of real estate. Those are big six months projects onto themselves, that there's really no one to manage independently.

Okay. I know that you and I have emailed back and forth about some city properties that are looking, so that makes a lot of sense. I appreciate that. Is it possible for us to get a list whether it's an internal, nonpublic list of the properties in question or the projects in question?

Absolutely. I can work on that for you.

Thank you. That's all for my questions at the

moment. Thank

you, Mr. Chairman. Director Flunner, I want to start by commending the herculean task you've taken on for the last year to get where you are and in advance to thank you for the herculean task you're going to take to complete it. I'm a little concerned overarching that as we've consolidated this effort that the city council does not have a way to recognize whether we are increasing costs or decreasing costs. And it I'd like to follow-up on alderwoman O'Neil's question.

I very much look forward to seeing that spreadsheet. And mister chairman, I almost want to tentatively think about bringing director Fliner back once we've seen the spreadsheet. But the spreadsheet is most valuable if it shows that department a took x number of dollars and transitioned it to central services and central services has that number in the budget. I think it's prudent for the city council to to look at that and say, did you save money by this consolidation or did you add money? Does it say that? Does it say does it have that information?

A pre turner budget analyst? Yes. And you will see that with ITS as well. But with the central services, you will see that it decreased in other departments and increased there, but they there are substantial increases in central services as well.

That's a challenging thing. We've moved some of those funds ourselves from one bucket to another and then our funding, it looks like it's staying flat, but really we're we're covering that gap.

There is an increase there in central services.

And I I can try at a very high level just to point you to some of the the glaring things. There are about five right here that might clear this up. So if you look at central services operating budget, you'll notice the contract services jumped about $900,000 That's the biggest increase. That 909, that covers $644,000 in rent, just rent payments. That was coming out of facilities before. That's moving into central services as we try to centralize a real estate budget under the central services budget. So that's just our rent payments. That was always happening, that was always in facilities before and that just moved over from other bucket.

Quick clarifying question, is that for multiple different properties or we just talk about one property?

Just one property.

Okay. Thank you.

I don't know that without the data in front of us, this is a useful conversation. I appreciate, but I think, the finance committee needs a spreadsheet. And to your point, x number of dollars for rent last year, x same number of dollars for rent this year. Got it. It's the excess or the the decrease that I'm looking for in this spreadsheet, in order to tell are we asking for more money, identifying where savings are by the consolidation, etcetera.

Yes. You will see that. The increases and the decreases that you're requesting, you will see that, but you will also see increases as well. A lot of the increases are gonna be for the maintenance contracts that were asked for, But, yes, there are increases with central it's a a roll up of three four divisions, but there are increases there as well as the centralization.

Thank you. And and not You you

can see that on the spreadsheet.

Yeah. Not for today, but just to give you a heads up when we discuss this, contractual services for central services increased from 5,000 to $909,000. Almost a million dollars. 9 tenths of 1,000,000. I think look at that, where that came from and where the savings are and where the increases are.

The second thing is, again, I wanna commend you for all the work you've done, but I'm really challenged by the lack of data and metrics that you have. The mayor has oftentimes talked about the aging vehicles, the aging the average age of the fleet of vehicles or the median age, however you would want to look at it. I don't see that as a goal.

Slide. So fourth from the bottom, do have the average age of fire, police, and all other department fleets. Our benchmark was eight years. As of last year, we're at ten point four years. I will tell you we are higher than that this year. But the reason we didn't share that data is we couldn't confirm that number with any certainty after our fleet manager left while our current system is offline. Well, it's online, but while we're in between systems. So we should have an answer to that question very, very soon once we go through our modernization project. But the goal is there. What I would say, Alderman, at a higher level is I come from high performing teams.

We built performance metrics in my state agency in my former role and I've had a lot of questions about these metrics and how we measure them and I think historically we've just used observational data put that up here and ran with it. And we're talking about we actually need to measure things and we need to have what was the start date, what was the end date, what were the down days. So we have huge opportunities there to improve that across the board with central services with all of my teams. I joke I don't know what the number of work orders necessarily tells us about our facilities, right? I would be curious like are we saving money by proactively, preventatively maintaining something versus having it go offline later?

Is there a way to capture the time, dollar amount of these work orders instead of just saying a number? How do we tie that to actual success and actual workspaces that look great? So I would like to take a fresh look at all of these, find a clear way to measure them. I also come from the school of SMART goals, making sure they're specific, measurable, attainable, relatable, and time sensitive and giving new goals next year that we can measure that actually do direct to our success.

Do you have a date, a deadline you've given yourself to determine what these goals are and what these performance metrics are?

No, it's kind of going back to my point about the deputy director. I have to hire staff, I have to write policies. If we need to rework our goals, that would fall to me too. So I could prioritize that work whatever way the administration wanted to, but whatever comes first pushes everything else further down on the list. But that would all be work I would perform and we could start that now or we could do it later in the year.

I think this is critical in your department, several others too, is critical that we get to these performance metrics because it's really hard to put more money into something when we don't know what the intended result of it is. So

I agree. I and I maybe there's system opportunities here. We can talk to ITS. I know, director Vogel and the DPW engineers all share the the engineering goal. This this was taken from DPW, what they had used for their engineers in years past. So I, maybe they have a better idea or maybe they're moving to modernize that a certain way in the future. But we would work with all the departments. We probably also need to pull some of the older vehicles out of our fleet, right? So if we do that next year we can lower the age of our entire fleet and not have twenty year old snow plows out on the road. That's all stuff we need to look at and we could do that next year.

We could do that starting now if that's our high priority.

Yeah. And and to be clear, I'm not saying pull them out or not pull them out. I'm looking for the metric that that you're working. In that case, with public works, I don't think you should have to create it alone. It's a collaboration. But I think we've gotta get to those numbers so that this body can decide whether to invest in more plows, more more equipment, whatever. And right now, I I can't make that case.

Understand. Yeah. I It just might change the way some departments do business. You know, we have CIP projects right now in our CIP book that aren't fully funded. So what is on time on budget if it's not fully funded and we don't know what that full budget's gonna be?

Yeah. So let's drill down there because you made the comment that you don't have a way to measure budget and timeline. And on the face of it, that's just a scary statement. And do you see a time when you are able to measure or another department measure whether procurement is on budget and on time?

Sorry. Yeah. You mean like facility engineering, like our engineering projects are on time on budget or procurements on time on budget?

Yes, yes, and yes. So everything. You know, in other words, when when you made the comment, it scared me that the process needs to be fixed. And we don't we don't have a way to know when procurement is ready and that sometimes procurement's coming into your court, but the design isn't ready yet. So that's not accurate. If you're on the other end of that, how it's exceptionally frustrating because we can't track the timeline. And so again, I'd like do you have a date when you think that that system's gonna be fixed?

Well, no. I do not. And and we don't have, like, a engineering operating system that all of our engineers use all day every day to track our projects. They they just track expenses through Munis like most of our other expenses. I think what makes this challenging, and I'll give you an example for myself, we wanna look at the fire engine or fire sorry, the fire stations.

We wanna look at, we know they're they're old facilities. We know we need to get serious about renovating them, but it it's an incredibly complex process because we can't take any fire station offline. We have to actively do construction while they're operational in those same locations. So because of that, I believe next year, we've requested 200,000 to start the assessment, But I don't think there's funding beyond that to pay for the renovations in the design if we move forward with that. So we might have to change our process then where maybe we can't add something to the CIP book until we get all of the funding and it's all set aside and then we know and then we run with it, but then that might delay project start dates also.

So I wouldn't want to jump in and assume that fixing this over here won't create other challenges downstream. I think it's a holistic process and it's a big how we approach CIP, how we measure them, how we start them, how we fund them. I'm sure you all get the questions too. Happy to work with you and others in the city to improve that process if we can.

If I can speak to the CIP funding, one of the things that has been true in several projects and we made some deliberate choices this year including in some of the projects Director Flanner mentioned is to deliberately fund design, planning and design and get to the end of that so we know we have a sense of okay, so how much is that? What are the design choices we made? Having a little bit more of a formalized yay verily, we're all in agreement, this is what we're going to build, and then budgeting that when you have a better sense of what that cost actually is. But having that opportunity for design tradeoffs up front and being a little bit more deliberate about it. There are some changes I think to to the general approach for CIP that, I certainly would like to see the city make, but that's one of them is to is to have a little bit more of a gap in some sense so that we have a moment for agreement of here's what we're doing.

So in terms of these performance measures, I think your question around how do we go about tracking the details of that because the metric is is around project milestones, right? So presumably you've got a project plan, you've got some dates associated with that, how often are you meeting your dates, right? So the metric was 80% of the time. I think part of what you're hearing is that we don't actually maintain a detailed schedule like that. And so I think there's some long term conversations around, how we go about doing that for greater clarity and transparency and I know that's a frustration that council has had is not feeling like you have insight into what do those timelines look like and things like that.

Yeah. Thank you. And not to get too into detail, but I totally agree with what you just said. I'm fine with that. But what I wanna know is when it goes into procurement, director Flinner knows it went into procurement today and he can measure, you know, if the decision is not to go into procurement, that's not a delay in procurement. That's a leadership decision to not move forward. Then when the decision is to go forward, that's when your clock starts.

Procurement is within our control. A a a CIP projects are are much, much different. But procurement, we can monitor, and and we need to do a better job of treating the other departments too and and letting them know when to get us involved, what they need to do, you know, what information they need to gather on their own before it moves to procurement. And then we also plan to train departments for writing, SOWs so that they can write their SOW and submit it and we will use that as an indicator of when the timeline starts from the moment the SOW is submitted until the day the contract is signed.

Got it. There are a couple things that I think you could start measuring that I would like to start to see some data on slide three and you pointed it out. But, you know, some of the OSHA recordable data, number of emergency road calls, things like that that I I look forward to seeing that data, you know, somewhere on a quarterly basis or something like that that if they're important enough to go in here, think we should start measuring them so we can when when we come time for looking at performance metrics in next year's budget, we're not in the same place. Let me let me let me ask let me shift subjects. Do you measure overtime in central services?

Central services used to have a lot of day to day overtime. And when I started, I couldn't find a strong justification for that. So I ended that practice. So we went from having some teams get overtime day to day to cutting that completely. But in other areas we added overtime.

So another gap we identified our first year is we didn't have a very clear weekend on call process, schedule, individual. So how is work getting performed on the weekends? Who do individuals call? If there's an accident or or something breaks in a facility, what do we do? So we, while we scaled back, kind of that day to day here and there over time, we scaled up every weekend having, we have two union covered staff on call Saturday and Sunday, one for fleet and one for facilities, much in the same way that emergency management and public works have on call staff.

We we did a similar model. So in that respect, we actually added over time because that had never happened before, and we moved our personnel funds around this year to cover that. But next year will be our first full year with this new overtime plan. We're gonna monitor that total cost and then ask for those amounts because I don't anticipate having weekend technicians on call ending anytime soon.

You budget a certain number of hours of overtime in fiscal year twenty seven?

No. Just just what we forecast based on what we did this year.

Get us that number?

Sure. With some help I can. Yeah.

Call that a specific action item. I'm to jump in because we've fifteen minutes left. So

Can I just ask one more question?

Go ahead.

This goes just to confirm what you said to alderwoman O'Neil. So your point is you've asked for three new positions. And if it was up to you, you would go to two positions in the top two on that list. Is that what you said?

I asked for seven positions, but, yeah, I know. I I won't get all of that. And in in in a perfect world, I would take the top two over the next five on that list. Sure.

Thank you.

Okay. Yeah. So I I get what Alderman Tharp was saying about the performance measures, but I actually had a compliment for you on your performance measures. So I think one of the struggles I see a lot of other departments hit is that they are they're using outputs rather than outcomes. They're using this sort of intermediary like here's how much work we did as opposed to how effective it is.

And I think most of yours are much more along the lines of actual outcomes. So I appreciate that. To dig into a specific one of those, you were seeing a lot more work orders get done this year than last year. And that's great. But I'm just curious, do you think it's more due to more getting done, a greater percentage getting done, or more due to more coming in? Do you have the distinction?

Both, honestly. Okay. I'd just say that even capturing a work order isn't as straightforward as you would seem. We have one system that we use to capture work orders. A lot of employees send work orders through there. That's how they send work to us. But not always. Some people call me directly, some people text me. Same with my facility team. So something we're gonna work on next year in in with the training that we're gonna do for other departments is have one facility liaison in every department submit work orders through this platform so we can measure this and we can say definitively this is the work we're having coming in. We can prioritize that and defend ourselves and say, hey, this is way higher priority than this, so we'll get to you Thursday.

Right.

Do we'll And do for the first time in years is a good example of that. And

I wanna I'm gonna try and keep us moving just because we're running long time.

I'm ready for rapid fire. Let's do

it. Great. The big thing I'm noticing, I take what you're saying about why in a lot of cases we're seeing an increase between FY twenty seven and f y twenty six. But what I noticed is sitting a couple places, and it's not just staff, which would make sense. But in quite a few places, there is less money getting spent in f y twenty six than what's budgeted for. Right? Like, just take one line item. We budgeted a $100,000 for contract services. We only spent $5,000. Why do you think that's happening?

Is that in the central services budget?

Yeah. Central services budget summary as I see it.

So one of the items in there right now is the $100,000 for real estate that the city manager mentioned a moment ago. We didn't have any real estate work to perform in terms of surveys or appraisals or feasibility studies. And I did all of the lease renewal and the tenant relations work that was required. So that has gone unspent this year, but I know we're getting it next year. We also received, I believe it was 500,000 last year for special projects, and we spent that down, but I know we're putting some of that back because we're not going to draw all of that down.

So that's also I think why you're seeing that. And it just a shift in the thinking from when other departments created this budget to now the budget I'm trying to create for my department.

Okay. Thank you. I wanna talk about security guards. So I think that's covering here and Gorman Street. Is that correct? Anywhere else?

We do at the pool.

Right? Parksville to say at the pool, but that was in their budget.

That is in their budget, but we have a guard there.

Oh, okay. Wait. Wait. I'm confused. There's a $180,000 budget here in central services for security guards. Is that it's just here in Gorman. Okay. Thank you. How do we know if that's worth the money? How do we know whether that $180,000 is better spent on this or on a block and a half of sidewalks?

So the challenge there is our real best and only alternative. Well, guess there's two. We we could go with unarmed security which would be less expensive, but but probably I think others would also say less secure. The only other alternative is to use Annapolis Police Department officers. From what I've been told, we did use officers in the past, but we we pay those officers overtime at at 50% higher than their normal rate, and and that almost was cost prohibitive.

I know. I don't doubt that it's better to contract than to use overtime officers. I I think you're forgetting alternative three, is not having it and spending that money on sidewalks. That's what I'm getting at.

And I I heard your your conversation in Reckon Park, and I I see where that's coming from. I what we see a lot is, and I mean a lot, is is the other side of that. And the fears for individual safety from employees and visitors who come into our building, we probably get one report every two months. When we receive one of those reports, we work with APD and we do a security assessment. We have one underway right now.

We've done two here in City Hall. And so when trying to grapple with how safe do we want to be and are we welcoming or we set I always choose safety. I really do. I know our other government facilities here in Annapolis, the state capitol, the county office buildings, they all have security. So I don't feel like we're missing something by doing what they're doing in order to keep everyone who enters this building safe each and every day.

Let me put it a different way, Take stop stop sidewalks as the example. Say it's traffic calming. How do we know whether we're saving more lives spending that $180,000 on security in our building versus on traffic calming, which, you know, through thirty six thousand people a year die from traffic accidents?

We don't. And I mean if we wanted to take out security guards tomorrow, we could. We could pivot to make the facility as safe as we wanted to. We have an ask in our CIP to start getting serious about renovating this facility, which would include a better entry, foyer, security checkpoint if we wanted that. So we're already considering these things.

But we could have the public or the building be publicly available and we can have all the offices and all the interior doors that are locked. We could lock the front door and and just say, hey, this is an office building, you know, invite only type of thing. So we could shift operations to make that work. I would just encourage the council and others to consider how safe everyone feels with or without that guard there.

Sure. Thank you. Next up is I feel free to tell me if you feel like you already covered this, but, is there a benefit to having well, actually, no. We already covered it. I'm just gonna skip. Centralizing landscaping and grass cutting. Could you just give us an update on that? That was something we talked about when you were here last year. How's that going?

Great. We we have the the city's lawn care contract with some exceptions. So, public works currently, manages lawn care around rights of way. So that's still something that's in their portfolio. And then the rec and park department still maintains the lawns at the parks. We have all of our facility lawns, all the grass around our buildings. We're asking for a little more money this year because we are upping the frequency of that mowing. We noticed several facilities last year were only getting addressed once every ten to fourteen days, and we wanted to roll that back to once every seven days. So actually grass cutting started the week of April 13. That's happening now.

We're gonna do a better job staying on top of that, so our our facilities reflect the world class work we do here.

Yeah. You and me both. I could do a better job staying on top of my grass cutting. I'm feel free to tell me again because they're sitting right behind you if you'd rather have police answer this. But I'm curious. We have two cleaning line items. One is $18,000 for facility deep cleaning all over the place, and then there's $200,000 specific to police. Why can we do everywhere else for 18,000, but we need 200,000 for police?

Well, police included a little more. So at at the start of the budget process, I went around to all the departments. I said, how can we serve your needs better? What would you like to include in our budget? And and obviously, we got a lot of requests. But one of the ones from police, in in many people's memory, the carpet has never been replaced and the facility hasn't been painted. And and I think folks are saying ten plus years. That's been the case there. That's something that that a, we need to address at all facilities, but especially at our police department where there's men and women working every day. So the reason that is split is because we are going to split out all of their painting and all of their carpet just on its own and then take that same look at all the other facilities.

And our goal is to get every facility on a rotating schedule or once every five years, you know, we we we paint your walls, we replace your carpet, and then that 18 is also going to cover floor buffering, hardwood floors, making sure somebody is coming in once every six months to make sure those look nice and clean.

And in an ideal world, do you think that's once we kind of get on that schedule, is it in the operating budget or in the capital budget? Feel free to defer to Joel or Vicki if.

Typically all that would be in operating from a maintenance perspective, but if there could be a justification for something to be considered a large scale renovation or something to that effect, we could then maybe capture it as capital. But for some of the work that they're talking about, it's recurring in nature and so therefore would be deemed up.

Last thing was the $250,000 for priority repair and maintenance. Do you guys have a list of what the priorities are already that you could share with us? This is under contract services.

Priority repair maintenance? I'm sorry.

In our budget book, there's a line item of $250,000 for priority repair and maintenance under contract services.

I'll have to look into that and let you know. I'm not sure unless the budget team knows.

We made in an effort to in the budgeting process with the numerous different line items, we adjusted it to becoming a single bucket where we wanted to be able to have give you the opportunity to prioritize as you continue navigating through the year and identifying which really became the highest priority item out of that list. And so it was a singular item to just give a little bit of opportunity for you to continue to inform that, but apologies if that wasn't communicated clearly to

A little bit of inside baseball for you guys. The enhancement requests from central services were pretty detailed and what we rather than us necessarily picking and choosing this much for this very specific thing, this much for this very specific thing, we lumped that together and are gonna and asked central services to as to essentially use their best judgment amongst those things of what's what's the priority, rather than us a priori deciding that.

Thank you. That's all the questions I have. We've got three minutes left. Either of my colleagues have any more questions?

The only thing I would say is looking forward to getting the spreadsheet, being able to look at it, and holding the tentative opportunity to have a further discussion.

Yeah, and not only spreadsheet, but I'm telling you I'm going make it into a Sankey diagram so it's got nice flows. You guys were laughing at me when I said that last week. It's going to be beautiful. Ms. Buckland.

Can you talk about fleet replacement?

I'll actually speak on two things. So your question about the overtime, you can see the overtime within each of the divisions on OpenGov. If you click the report and then you just click the drop down in salary and benefits, it has an overtime line there and it shows how much for each division.

Thank you.

You're welcome. So we had I think four or five scenarios that central service, gave us. One that covered everything that was 4,300,000. We went with the third scenario where we could find funding for, that is giving about 3,300,000. 950,000 of that is grant funding for two medic units.

Then there's the 500 and $530,950 of capital reserve funding, 250,000 of that also goes to the medic units, but the rest of it can be for, the vehicles that are covered on in scenario three, which is, a work vehicle for central services, 13 police patrol cars, one bear cat. There is a wellness van for community services, and then we have enterprise funds, for water and sewer. The combination is 285,500. That's for two vehicles, one in water and one in sewer. Then 50,000 of it is, for good of sale revenue that typically, fleet replacement will receive for selling a vehicle or, but majority of it is gonna be a 100 I'm sorry, 1,500,000 master lease that's gonna cover the rest of these vehicles.

Yeah, go ahead.

Just for clarification, so you said three scenarios. You chose scenario three to fund. Yes. And then you did list off the wellness ban for community service. They currently have one. Is that for replacing it or is that for maintenance on it?

Replacing. All of these are vehicles that are being replaced.

Yeah, that particular vehicle is currently not in service.

That was a vehicle that was prior in service as a medic unit that we converted? Yes. Would it cost us more money to convert it? Thank you.

I got a quick question and then Alderman Thorpe adds maybe a more detailed one. I noticed there's a line item here that says includes funding for parking lot paving and maintenance. Where would the parking lot paving and maintenance money be? Where would we see that?

Can you repeat that, please?

Sure. Under fiscal year twenty seven budget highlights, it says includes funding for parking lot paving. Is that under special projects? Is that I'm not seeing that anywhere else. What parking lot are we talking about? Where would we find it?

I believe no. That I believe that's in, contract services, in the contract services breakdown. Excuse me. Director Floner, if you wanted to speak towards this. This is the funding that you asked for for the maintenance in the parking lot pavement.

Yeah. I don't see it on the list. It's in the priority repair. But we did request money to patch up holes in our parking lot. So all of our facility parking lots are part of our portfolio. Resealing our parking lots, restriping them, fixing and patching asphalt, That's what that funding is for.

Got you. Okay. Alderman Thorpe, you have a question?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'd still like to talk about overtime the next time we get together. So I've gone to the reports and I'd rather not be the guy to go through and compare all these. For instance, I've got projected fiscal year twenty six overtime here at one point for less than $5,000 and in '27 an increase to $35,000. So I don't know if that's right or wrong. So I'd I'd just like to start with the big number for the department. This is what we had for overtime for the last couple years. Apples to apples. This is what we're we're budgeting for '27.

And then as possible, you know, what are the biggest chunks of that to drill down? I think that's a key number that we should be looking at, a management number in order to keep costs down or in some cases, keep costs up. You might want to hire overtime people that some people have that situation, but I'd like to drill down into that if we can. Thank you.

You all can help with the property list. I can look at those overtime numbers and explain why we're requesting what we're requesting.

Perfect. Thank

you. All right. With that, we're a couple minutes overtime. We will recess until 09:40. That's when we've got police starting. And, I need a motion for that. Right, miss Jackson? Yeah. Is there a motion to recess until 09:40? So moved. So

moved. Second.

All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Meeting called to order at 09:42 a. On 04/27/2026. We'll turn it right over to acting chief Migas.

Good morning. How is everybody?

Great.

So I'm here with, myself, obviously, major

Good morning, everyone.

My deputy chief.

Acting captain Hilo Hurley. Good morning.

Greg Medley, police administrative manager.

So we are starting with the presentation with the format that you gave us. We start with our org chart. Understand it is, it's a lot, but basically you have the office of the chief of the of police. Under that directly is the deputy chief, the major, internal affairs, professional standards, the PIO, the chaplains program. So internal affairs is our internal complaint system.

Professional standards more deals with policy and inspections and audits. So that's kind of the difference between professional standards and internal affairs. The major then the captain's report to him, and there's a captain over patrol, a captain over investigations. Acting captain O'Herlihy is the captain over administrative services. And those are the main branches, those three captains of the department.

Patrol encompasses a lot of different things, not just patrol. It also has canine traffic safety. The crossing guards report to our traffic safety unit. There's also some decentralized units that fall under patrol like our SWAT team which is called ASSET, the Annapolis Special Emergency Team, our marine unit for our boat, our motors. We have two motorcycles.

Those aren't full time units. They're kind of a part time add on. And then investigations encompasses not just investigations proper like homicide, robbery, but also drug investigations, other special investigations. So our kind of vice alcohol enforcement things fall under them as well. SEET is our special enforcement action team.

They do a lot of warrant services. So when we have people with active warrants, they go out regularly to find them. Then again there's also some decentralized units that fall under investigations including our crisis negotiation team And then there then first, we also have community outreach which falls under investigations. It's kind of a place it's been put. It's not the best place, I think for community outreach and that includes our reentry team as well.

And then administrative services is everything pretty much that's not directly police related. It is HR. It is payroll. It's our property and evidence section. It's our fleet and building maintenance. It's our IT department. It's records. It's our emergency communications. It has a lot education and training, recruitment, purchasing, everything falls under admin. Any questions about the org chart?

Okay. We'll keep going then. So our f y twenty six accomplishments. So our calls for service are logged in our CAD system. Every call an officer goes on or calls out with is logged into that system.

And in f y twenty six, so far, our officers have handled over 39,000 calls for service, which means we're on pace for about 50,000 for the full year. I believe that's a I I wasn't able to pull the numbers from last year, but it's definitely an increase. The biggest increase was in frequent checks and foot patrol. So officers are doing a lot more proactive patrols in neighborhoods, which is what we hear from the community is what they want. They wanna see officers out and about in their community on foot and just checking on what what's going on.

What's a frequent check?

So say it could be anything from someone's going out of town and they call us and say, hey, could you check on my house while I'm gone? We do that service. It could be, hey, we had a robbery here and we wanna make sure that we're going by there frequently so that it doesn't become a pattern. Could be a crime victim, you know, could be a security issue. We have businesses that frequently have shopliftings, so that might be a frequent check to go by those businesses and just stop in, say hi to the the people inside.

So it's a it's a wide variety of different things. Our reentry program For f y twenty six, we have 15 people have graduated through NCIA which is the one of the organizations we partner with up in Baltimore. They do training for HVAC. They do, CDL training, and we take Annapolis residents up there every day. Transportation is a big issue for the people that are participating in those programs.

There's a lot of good programs out there. Most of them aren't in Annapolis, and so it's hard for people to get to those programs. So a large part of what we do is facilitate people going to and from those programs and making sure they have the paperwork that they need to be able to do them. These are programs that have no cost. They're grant funded if you qualify.

And so it's a big advantage for the people participating to be able to get there and take advantage of the the free training. And then we participated in over 640 community outreach events and activities, attended over 270 community meetings, and visited Annapolis schools over 260 times. And that's for the calendar year f y of 2025, not the fiscal year. It's just hard sometimes to parse things out when we capture things different ways. But last summer, we held 10 summer camps, including our fishing camp, sailing camp.

We did a raven field trip to Ravens training day. We did a fellowship camp, and we did navy navy basketball game as well. We also went to parks and recs camps to conduct safety presentations. And we partner with a lot of different groups to make these camps successful. Everyone from Chesapeake Regional Accessible Boating, CRAB, Charting Careers, the Live Water Foundation helps us with swimming lessons for kids, Calvary United Methodist Church, the Maryland Saltwater Fisherman's Association, the Optimist Club, Play Annapolis, and the Boys and Girls Club.

And then we also have private sector people who help like anglers. There was actually like a fundraising event this weekend for our fish camp. Anglers provides us with a lot of the equipment that we need. Annapolis Sailing School helps, Old Navy, and Center Lane Swim Club which is a pool down in Edgewater. She lets us use the pool for our swim classes.

It's a heated pool so we can do it throughout the year. It's really convenient. We have our van that we use and that makes transportation easy as well. And, you know, if I'm leaving somebody out, it's not because they haven't helped us, it's just because I don't have them written down. And then we also have our police athletic league. So there's ongoing events throughout the year. There were over a 130 events last calendar year including boxing, volleyball, intramural basketball, and swimming.

Just wanna make sure you're aware you're a little more than halfway through your time.

Sounds good. So our performance measures. These we've had these performance measures for a few years. I would like to look at them for next year, of updating them. But our current ones are response. Well, so let's start at the top. Crime rates. The numbers there are per 1,000 residents?

100,000.

100,000 residents. So that's the way that the FBI reports crime. So it sounds it looks a little weird, but our crime rates, as you can see from f y twenty five to '26 have gone down. We're estimating where we might look for FY '27. Our responses have gone down as well, so response times to calls for service.

We're a small area so our response time is usually pretty pretty low. Our clearance rates for homicide, so I know this looks a little weird but a 500% clearance rate for FY '26 to date, that is because homicides from prior years were charged. So you always count you count when the crime occurred, but then it when it gets cleared, you count it that year. You can't go back and change the prior year's numbers. So that's why it says 500%.

Our clearance rate for robbery, you can see remains has gotten better from f y twenty five. Our clearance rate for aggravated assault again has improved. And then our CLIA compliance, we've achieved compliance in our last reviews and we are on schedule to achieve it again as well. So our enhancements that we asked for, there's some conversions. What the civilian conversions that we asked for are ones that are nearing their five year limit.

So the city code specifies that contract positions must either be converted or terminated within five years. They can't remain contractual forever. So those ones are nearing their limit. We work with finance and HR to determine kind of which positions to ask for conversions for. Say that we only have one or two that are nearing that five year mark and have to be converted, we may add some in there so that we're not asking for one person one year and like six positions the next year.

So we try to have some sort of schedule for that. And prior to the budget submission, we work with finance and HR to to determine which ones would be good candidates to ask for. And always in order of of how old they are, those positions. The police sergeant conversion, we asked for that so that we could increase the number of sergeants in patrol. Right now, there are four sergeants over the patrol shifts, one for each patrol shift.

And when they're out, their corporals fill in. There's a corporal on each shift. This added sergeant is to add more coverage for sergeants in patrol. So when those scheduled patrol sergeants are on vacation, this sergeant could fill in an increased supervision. So this, position will take a corporal position and convert it into a sergeant position which is why it's not a full cost and it's not an addition.

So we remain at one twenty five, sworn as a number instead of going up to one twenty six. And then we asked for some equipment for our crime scene investigation. We have some old equipment that stopped working and needs to be replaced. So that's the crime scene evidence. The next one is the unmanned aerial surveillance program.

We had the money in the budget to hire a program manager for that position this year. We're we're conducting interviews for that position now, and hopefully, we will be able to continue their employment beyond the fiscal year by including this in the budget. Also, we asked for an increase to our cadet salary. Our cadet salary was pegged at minimum wage $15. County increased their cadet pay, I believe, to 17, and so we asked for an increase as well.

It's not a huge amount. The aerial surveillance program, we need to upgrade our Axon package that we have, not just for the aerial surveillance, but also, our packages just up for renewal this year. We have a five year contract with them. The contract is up for renewal in August. The cost will go up, so we had to budget for that in the enhancements.

The CAD system, computer aided dispatch. We wanna move to the same computer aided dispatch system that Anne Arundel County is going to use. This will help with communications between our agencies. This new system will also be used by the fire department, both the county and the city. So we'll be on the all we would all be on the same system.

The ITS budget, some data management interoperability that is for a system that integrates data from different sources for one into one platform. Increase our training budget. We ran out this year. We're always looking to increase our our budget. There's a lot more statewide certifications that we have to maintain and also that are required trainings that we have to do. We do a lot of training in house. Specialized training like I said.

That is your time. If you guys can try and wrap it up fairly quickly. Thank you.

Sure. So the specialized training that we have to have for our crime lab and other places so that's the increase for that. The less lethal munitions, we we maintain a stock of those and they have to be replaced every now and then. The same for the asset conversion kit allows for training on some of those munitions. We need to replace mounted lights for some of the weapons.

Like I said, equipment for our forensic services unit, some forcible entry kits, lot of little things for the asset team, cameras. Our community programs are run on basically no budget from our partnerships and from the police foundation. And so we did a rooted in resilience camp last year, and we would like to continue doing that. And then increase, budget for recruiting. And our trends. So our budget has gone up.

Pretty much the bulk of the budget increases, salaries, benefits because that's the bulk of our expenses. Overall, for our operating budget is about 4,000,000. Every year I go through, we review contracts that we have. Are they good? Should they be adjusted?

Software contracts, are we using them to the best ability? Do we need to change them? The last three years since I've been back, we've gone down in operating budget about 2% to 4% each year just with those reviews of what are we actually spending, do we actually need to spend these things, is there another program that would better fit our needs. Unfortunately, the salaries and stuff go up every year. There's not a whole lot that can be done about that one.

Did give you a quick FY '25 to our projected and to '27. Just a quick visual. Same thing. Salaries have gone up. Everything else fluctuates slightly.

Contract services did go up. Supplies went down and that's because Axon used to be and that's our biggest contract. Used to be housed in supplies. I moved it to contract services where it should be because it's contract service. Overall, the combination are about the same year over year. It's just buckets that they're in.

This shows some of the grants that we have, revenue from grants, and then revenue from red light cameras and speed cameras. The BWC redaction is listed as revenue. However, we use a third party company to do those redactions and so most of that money is going to pay then the company doing the redaction. We it's it's just to cover the cost of that. And then fingerprinting fees, we do citizen fingerprinting at the department which is a service needed by people who work with children and things like that.

So both of those are just an in and out. We pay the bill, the people pay us to reimburse us.

Revenue versus operating?

So our our revenue or grants, everything has stayed about 9% of our operating budget. Our grants, our biggest grant is the state aid for police protection. That amount is determined by the state from population, crime trends, a plethora of different categories. They just tell us what we're getting each year. Normally, it's around 1,500,000 the past couple years. Fourth quarter, they readjusted. We could get a little bit less, we could get a little bit more. We don't know. But it's pretty much average at 1.5.

Yeah. Hey guys, we're five minutes overtime. Let's skip to the last slide.

Sounds good.

Okay. Forfeitures, we get forfeiture money from our Is this

the last slide? Okay. Thank you.

Yep. We get forfeiture money from our

We have an officer in the high intensity drug trafficking area, Haida.

Yeah. Our federal partnerships. And that pays for our off our off-site office for narcotics and vehicles, leased vehicles, and other supplies and things like that.

Great. Thank you. Auto Roman O'Neill, you want to get us started?

Yes.

Public Safety Chair

And for anybody that wants more information, the last Web of Safety Committee, APD came and gave a long presentation about all the different departments, who does what. So if you want information exactly on what the police department does, I would go back and watch that from April 18, I think it was. But the Wednesday before last. My question for you is in regards to the professional standards manager because they're listed at the top of your org chart but I see on our staffing summary that it went from one to zero. Can we talk about that?

Is that correct?

It's not it's not correct. There are some different positions that we've had in personnel. So when you remember when Rhonda McCoy was here, her job when she left was changed. And so now we have the professional standards manager sorry. We we no longer have a civilian professional standards manager. We have a sergeant who is doing that work and internal affairs has an internal affairs manager who is a civilian.

So it's just a zero because they're now a sergeant, so they fall under the this warrant. Okay. Thank you. That was my question. And then you talked about the $10,000 for community programs. Did that used to be Annapolis United funding they used to get or no?

So the Annapolis United funding was used for the Police Athletic League programs and and is still being used for that. The rooted in resilience money, those are basically to hold that 10,000 would be used to hold two camps throughout the year. We were able to do one last year and those are we we were able to partner with the crisis response system and a local camp. It was actually really reasonable rate and bring in families from Annapolis for some kind of mindfulness

Last week when we had office of emergency management here, I know that a large majority of their budget is grant funded. Are you seeing the same issues with grants? I know that not as large of a part of your funding comes from grants, but are you seeing the same issues where you've applied for grants that we've had for federal grants that you're not receiving?

So we haven't had many federal grants recently. Some of the grants that we've had have been for body body armor. There hasn't been as much fluctuation with some of those grants because they're not seen as problematic in some ways to people. But we have seen reductions in the grant amounts, say from the governor's office and I think that stems from them getting less grant funding from the federal government in turn. So we haven't seen as much of a reduction as they have.

I think what if we want to expand our which we do want to expand our grant applications, we may still see an increase but maybe it wouldn't have been as much as we had hoped. Things like victim services are where we're looking at for grants.

Thank you. Those are my questions at this time.

Auditor Thorpe. Great. Thank you, mister chairman. Chief Menges, thank you very much for coming out on Saturday and and quite frankly your presence, throughout the city. And I I just wanna compliment the professionalism of the Indianapolis Police Department. It is amazing.

Thank you.

If I could go to slide three, especially the first and the third number are pretty impressive numbers. As Alderman Huntley would call them, they're input numbers, but they're very useful. Do you have, any past numbers, of the same category, and do you have a projection for fiscal year twenty seven?

Yes. So I could definitely provide those. So I'll put that for follow-up in the in the spreadsheet. It is something that we track regularly. I just don't had I didn't have them at hand.

And I would say, you know, some of these things are not things that we necessarily seek to increase, right? The increase in the calls for service shows a workload of our officers. We know the bulk of the increase has been frequent checks and foot patrol. If that increase was for people reporting crime, that would not be as good of a metric. So just looking for an increase in calls for service isn't necessarily we almost wanna see a decrease, right, except in the proactive part.

So seeing that breakout which is something we also look at regularly is what's the breakout of what calls we're getting would probably be helpful for you. The people getting into our reentry program, great. You know, we strive to increase the amount of people we're reaching. The community events, think vary. So we have a large number. Should our goal be that we increase that, you know, year after year? Not necessarily. Right? I think it's driven by the community. Sometimes we change what kind of outreach we're doing based on what's happening in Annapolis.

So I think that can vary. I think it's just a good gauge to show like that we are active rather than we need to keep upping that number or I think it's more about who we're reaching, which communities we're seeing, that kind of information.

Yeah. Whatever data metric you need to measure, I mean, it keeping the priority on for instance, capm Thacker coming out to the ECA meeting the other day, huge payoff. So I would just like to see trends in the future.

Yep.

If I could turn to slide four and tell you that I don't have well, I just I just have a question, but they're very impressive numbers. And my question is, is my takeaway from this slide overall, the answer to the question of what are the the crime trends in solving crimes in Annapolis? What are the trends? If if if I look at this slide, we're trending in the right direction, '25 to '26, and our goal is '27, continue to keep that trend. Is that a a fair conclusion for that that slide?

Yeah and I mean I don't think we'll be improving on that 500% clearance rate for health. Year unless we really get going on these cold cases. But I think that we've been trending in the right direction. We're getting good information when we're doing these investigations. The detectives do an amazing job following up on these crimes and and I think that is shown in the the the numbers.

Yep. And and just the fact you used the national average there, I mean, that's perfect. Okay. Slide 13, speed cameras. How many speed cameras do we have? And I think it's fair that oddly enough the residents want some more. Could you how many do you have? How many additional are in a budget? And how many more would you like to have or could you operate and would be effective?

So we have five currently and that's been the case for a number of years. We are increasing that. So in the last budget, we added a sergeant position to move to traffic safety. And by the May, we should have, think, three more. Yeah.

Three or four more cameras ready by the May to be operational. We also have one red light camera currently, and he's also working on expanding that. And I believe that's four or five more red light cameras that we're working on as well. We have we have to review those citations when they're issued so that it is time. But the state recently allowed us to do that with non sworn personnel.

So that is helpful. I think we can manage you know doing more reviews with that help from the state. We've found them to be effective in that the number of violations goes down over time showing people are changing their behavior which is good. And we are also targeting these cameras in areas where we have a lot of crashes or we get a lot of community complaints. So that's important for us when we look for placement of these cameras.

Also, the money that we get, we currently use to offset the cost of the program which is mainly personnel. The contract does not cost us anything. They get a fee based on a per citation rate which is the normal practice for Maryland. Maryland does not allow a percentage given in one in these contracts. So it's a flat fee.

And right now the city code says that anything over our cost is supposed to go to the mobility fund. I might have some argument with that if we reach the point where we get more than we get more than than just what we need to offset the cost of those salaries of the people who are checking those citations. I think there's other things we could do with it in the police department. And obviously, we have the biggest budget, so offsetting our budget is a goal for for us as much as we can. Yeah.

So I think that answers your questions about speed cameras.

K. Thank you. Bicycle so you talked about foot patrols, more foot patrols. Many people would like to see more bicycles on the street. Is that a possibility?

Yeah. We actually have a class starting tomorrow for, the officers have to be trained. I know everyone knows how to ride a bike, but we have specific training that we give the officers for police bicycle operations. In fact, Craig used to be an instructor for it. We encourage the officers that are bike trained to go out on their bikes. You'll see them especially when the weather gets warmer. They'll have the the bike racks on their vehicles and they'll go out on their bikes. So it's something that we that we provide the training for so that we can get more officers out there.

How many bike however you measure it, how many bike patrol officers do you have in this budget?

Well, so they're just a regular officer that has the special training, and I couldn't tell you off the top of my head how many. But we regularly do this class at least once a year. And we have maybe eight or nine officers participate in it. So a number have been bike certified over the years.

There's at least 30,

and then there's some that I trained twenty years ago that just don't really ride anymore and stuff like that. So, it's more of like a constant replenishment of younger officers to be able to do it.

Thank you. One. That goes to overtime.

We got plenty of time.

Oh, really? Yeah. Okay.

Because we we made this one a little longer.

Overtime. So I guess I I could drill down here, but, do you have how do you track overtime and do you use traffic do you use overtime as a budget planning figure?

So we track overtime through kinda grouping codes. So Navy games has its own code. The boat show has its own code. If a if one of the patrol squads is short, it'll have its own codes. That way we can kinda track and see, okay, if, you know, this squad is has this much overtime.

Okay. What does that mean? Or, you know, is it because two officers went out on maternity leave or is it because two people got hurt or, you know, that squad just happens to need another officer there. So we do break it out fairly granularly for to give us operational info. So

Okay. So I cheated a little bit while I was talking to you and looked at the online budget book and I'm not sure that I have the right information here and that it says proposed overtime $2,000 and something tells me that's way off. I'm not a police officer but

Yeah. Think you just need to read the paper to know that

that Exactly. Could could you provide us some, some information? And I think, what I'd be looking at is to track that year over year because I think that's a management figure. And I want to reiterate not that that overtime is always bad. I think leadership should have the the opportunity to be able to put the right person on the job when it even when it's an overtime. But I would like to see that as a planning figure in this budget if you could get that to us.

I have it right here.

So I did add I did add that information on slide 10 this morning. Sorry. Just for the year over year track of it. Now it's not broken down any granularly than just overall overtime. I know that's I believe FY '25.

We had a good chunk of overtime that was for city hall because we're having issues here. So we also there was the one one year we ended up upping our neighborhood presence so that so really the overtime sort of has a linear progression and then it's got the outliers that really kind of swing it.

I did not notice that you added it to that slide. That's exactly the information I was looking for.

Okay. Great. Yeah. It's in there as final in the in the we added it. Yeah. From

a finance community standpoint, my opinion is that's the I don't need to drill down deeper than that. But I'd like I like the fact that you've got $2,500,000 for overtime. I almost said hours. $2,500,000 for overtime and that's your planning figure and over to you all to adjust it left or right. But since we do have time, let me ask another question.

And I don't know if this is an academic question or a real question, but one of the when I studied the the history of public safety in Annapolis, I've noticed that we budget significantly higher every year and we never get there. So projecting that we're gonna spend 23,000,000 and budgeting that we spend 27,000,000 on the face of it could be a queue we could be accused of creating a whole a big surplus or whatever. What is the realistic number? Do you have a realistic number of what the budget will come in spent for 2027?

And I I wanna put a fine point on that because I was gonna ask you a similar question. Can you tell us about how the vacancy savings have changed between f y twenty six and f y twenty seven?

Yes. I'm sorry. So something different that we did this year that we haven't done, previously is that we increased the vacancy savings for '27. Last year I think we did 1.5. This year we did 2,000,000. The decrease that you see in the projections is vacancies. It's nothing else but vacancies. They budget very, very well for each year with their contracts, with every other category. The only variable is salary and benefits because of the vacancies of the positions.

Can I repeat back to you what I think you just said?

Yes.

In '26, you have taken the money out?

So no. In f y twenty six, we only budgeted 1.5, million for salary savings, but because of the vacancies that they're experiencing for FY '26, the projection is lower than what we anticipated for them to have for FY '26. If they fill those positions, they'll still have some salary savings there because we're almost at the end of the year, But for f y '27, we didn't we increased the, vacancy savings that we within their budget. So instead of 1.5, we did 2,000,000. So we're expecting their vacancy savings to be 2,000,000 for FY '27 for them to level out more to what their actual expenses are.

I just want to add Alderman Thorpe that on the sheet that you're looking at specifically, it's a little hard to see that point that Capri is making because you would really need to compare the fiscal year twenty six budget adopted versus the fiscal year twenty seven proposed. So that projected number is inclusive of like real time projections with even more vacancy savings. But if you were to look at the adopted budget, the salaries line had about 26,900,000 versus this year's which is 27 0. And and so with some of those changes, inclusive of benefits and everything else, That's why it's kind of flat. But if you look specifically drilled into the salaries line, the fiscal year twenty six adopted budget was 15,700,000, whereas in 2027, it's 14,700,000.

And so that's that that's that change that Capri is speaking of between the adopted and the '27 proposed. These numbers with projected on it are gonna be even more inclusive of vacancies.

So chief, is this budget in your mind what you hope happens and you wanna have enough money to fill all the vacancies? And at worst case scenario, you fill out you you cut this, fill all the vacancies, and don't have enough money. Is that is that how you operate?

Yes. So, over time that is how the police department is operated. Yes. Best case scenario, I fill all our vacant positions and we're getting closer to that. So we're at one eighteen right now, out of one twenty five and I believe we have two more we're gonna hire soon, so we should get up to one twenty which is great.

So the closer we get to that full number and that's just sworn there are some civilian vacancies as well, but it it erases some of that vacancy gap. Right? I think I feel pretty confident that if we come back and we say we're running out of money, that that we'll we'll we'll find a solution, you know. I I think I think we'll make it happen. So but we haven't had to do that in year that I can remember. So while I'm hopeful we'll we'll get to that point and and fill all the vacancies, I think we'll probably be okay.

And even if you did fill all my understanding, just to confirm, if you fill all the vacancies, this funds it.

No. That's not true because of the fact that we have built in vacancy savings.

In the '27 budget.

In the '27 budget, there's $2,000,000 of vacancy savings. And so this is the like, one of the only departments that experiences this, which is due to the historical trend. There is an actual budgeted amount for turnover savings. And even if in fiscal year twenty seven, they were to fully staff up, assuming that they don't do it by July 1, you would experience still some of that vacancy savings and the fact that there is time related to the hiring process. But if if for somehow they're able to fully staff by July 1, we would actually be under budgeted for fiscal year twenty seven by $2,000,000.

By 2,000,000.

But the converse is if they didn't hire anybody whatsoever in f y twenty seven, let anybody additional, right, keeps the numbers flat at exactly where they are, they would still come in under budget.

Yeah. By by about 3 or $4,000,000. Yeah.

Thank you very much.

No problem. Alright.

I got a handful of questions for you guys. I'm starting also with salaries and benefits. Can somebody just remind me and I really should know the answer to this, but why when I'm looking at the difference between f y twenty six original and adjusted, it's about $350,000 lower. I know we moved a $100,000 in the capital outlay. What was the other change we made in within the f y twenty six budget to move that $250,000 out? Does anybody remember? It must have been an f t or something at some point.

It wasn't Feet. It was for, replacing the gun. The the guns.

Oh, yeah. They replaced our handguns.

Was that not when we moved the 100,000 to capital outlay?

It didn't just include that. It also included, the grant position, and I think it was one other position. But they were kind of net because they eliminated positions as well to create those positions.

Right. So then how is there about $250,000 less in the FY '26 adjusted overall than there is in the FY '26 original?

Give me one second.

I'll call it and I'll

give it to you.

I bet miss Buckle would know it off top of her head if she was here. Okay. Similarly, if we're looking at the difference between no. I'm not talking about projected. I know we were just talking about projected. I'm talking about what we budgeted last year, compared to this year. We've got both the contractual services and the supplies and other are going down relative to last year. Is that due to stuff going to central services? Yeah. Exclusively? Okay. So then Yeah. And IT. And IT.

IT. And

so then there's a couple line items in here that seem like it might make sense for them to go to central services or IT, and I'm just curious why they didn't. The ones that jump out to me are the the Axon contract, the communications and server maintenance. Any particular reason why those were decided not to move them? And if there isn't a particular reason, you can just say so. That's fine.

The that we moved to software I'm sorry. To IT was software, not all maintenance contracts. And what was the first question?

So the axon the axon is a lot of hardware. So it's the body worn cameras, but it's also our our taser.

Oh, okay.

So it's not just

Got it.

The software part was moved to ITS though, but the hardware part was left in their budget. And to answer your question about the salary and benefits, 100,000 was for the replacement of the guns and the holsters. The 250,000 was because they didn't receive the $9.01 1 grant. I'm sorry. Yeah. The decrease of the nine one one grant.

I remember that now. Thank you very much. You're welcome. I should have known that. Why is the Axon contract split into two line items for us? Is there any particular reason for that?

We've added, services through the life of our five year contract. So there should be like a bigger chunk and a smaller

Yeah. Yeah. The one would be if we renewed with exactly what we have now and nothing changed. And then the the additional additional is is those extra upgraded services and the new tasers and things like that.

Can you speak to what those enhancements are? Those upgraded services?

Sure. The main one that we really want, is the, unlimited third party storage. So right now when our officers have their b w c activated, the video gets uploaded into the Axon system and then becomes accessible based on your level of access, you know, so not it's not like every officer can view everyone's videos. But we even have, like, the state's attorney has access to the videos they need for court and things like that through this system. It's a digital evidence management system.

The officers can take photos on their phones and upload them directly into the system as well. So it's like an all in one digital management system for visual, you know, video and pictures. But that's only the Axon app taking photos and our b to b c camera. As you know, the city has a number of cameras. And so when we have a crime that occurs that's captured on our city cameras, we have to save that data as well. And right now, we're not able to use act the Axon system. So we actually physically have to burn CDs and hard drives and

Say don't.

Axon would allow us to to put our footage directly in there making it accessible to the state's attorney, to defense attorneys, you know, and and that way everyone so that's the biggest one. Other things include the the drones. So they have a a again, the same thing. If we get a drone through another system, we need to upload the video into Axon. With third party storage, we could do that. With the the way that they work with Axon, it would be more seamless.

Sure.

So No.

That's great. Thank you. I appreciate you walking me through that. I just had a note here to say this $550 for license plate readers has gotta be an amazing ROI. That seems like if you told me we were spending 10 times or or 20 times on that, I would still think it was probably a good deal. So that's sounds awesome.

So we we tend to use a lot of grant funding for those. So

That's just the excess, like, part of it. It's been there forever. So there

there are other costs associated with this. Okay. Alright. Well, I'll still give you the kudos. I think it's probably still a very good use of money. Just a couple things I'm hoping you can explain to me a little bit more. What's lead abatement services? Is that related to I mean

The range.

We have

an indoor

That makes sense.

So we have to remove it.

Yep. The alert grant coordinator, is that a full time equivalent position? Know I it's a contractor, but it's

No. It's a part time position, and it's fully grant funded through

Oh, yeah. I just wanted to make sure we weren't spending a whole FTE to administer one grant. How much do we spend on the chaplains program? I saw them kinda right up in the top of your org chart, but then there's no line item for us of that.

So there's a stipend that they've been receiving of $500 a year. So there's two active chaplains right now. And then there's also equipment. Brackets and identify them as

Couple thousand dollars for equipment and Great.

Can somebody explain to me we have this line in here of union contingency? What's that?

Go ahead.

So those are the signing bonuses. Twenty, zero over 10 officers per year. So, broken out into four years at all. 200,000. Gotcha. Makes sense.

I wanted to say that that fund also has helped them fill those vacancies.

Yeah. No. I I think signing bonuses, it's just like human nature that we prefer money now. And so having a signing bonus is probably better use and increase those salaries later. Can you is there any way you can help me understand how much we're spending on overtime for parades and special events and the trend on that? If you don't have that right now, maybe that could be a follow-up.

Yeah. Definitely follow-up. Because like Craig said, we, we track, you know, all those events and some are reimbursed and some aren't. So

Yeah. If we could just get really, like I said, what I wanna know is the trend. Is this increasing at 10% a year? Is it increasing at 30%? And if so, why? But I didn't expect you to have that right in front of you. So I'm sorry. Do you have something to say?

Yeah. Yeah. Just on the point of reimburse versus not, that is part of that city council legislation around fee waivers related to events. Yeah. There's sometimes you'll see those amounts. That's inclusive of some of that over time reimbursement.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's one point, we had a spreadsheet that broke out benefits line, if I'm looking back to f y twenty three, is growing so much faster than the salaries line?

Vacancy savings isn't gonna get applied there. I mean, Capri, actually, I'll let you handle that one. Guess I'll grab the mic.

Yes. Instead of breaking out the 2,000,000, between salary and benefits, we just fully put it in salaries.

That makes sense. We were talking about adding a sergeant position. Didn't we add a sergeant position last year? So is that sergeant helping with the same need or that sergeant that we added last year is totally just doing the new camera stuff?

Yeah. Then the sergeant that was last added last year went to traffic safety and is doing the speed camera red light camera additions. This one is for patrol specifically for the the patrol shifts and extra.

Think I've only got one more question for you guys, but it's kind of philosophical one. We were talking a little bit about the the work that gets done in the returning citizen reentry program, which by all accounts is amazing, and having people we're driving people to trainings. We're doing all these different things to help folks. What do you guys think about how the some of those services should maybe go to the Office of Central Services or, conversely, should some of the work that Office of Central Services done get moved to be under the police department? Are there opportunities to rebalance either of those things?

You mean the Office of Community Services?

Sorry. Yeah.

That's okay.

It's community service, not central I

was like, I don't think Matt Blinnard would play.

No. I don't think Matt wants to deal with that. No.

Yeah. No. That's an interesting question because when the Office of Community Services started in the mayor's office, at first it was it was kinda like, well, we're we're doing community outreach. We actually called it community services in the police department, and we changed it to community outreach so that it wasn't confused with the mayor's community services. But I think they do different work than us.

Some of it is similar, but because they have more of a social worker slant, I think they they are dealing with more of the holistic. I'm not saying that we don't do some of that on the side as well because I know we've been helping kids get to dental appointments and but there's some people that don't wanna come to the police for things. I think we're happy to to have the groups that we have that are comfortable and build on that trust that we have. But there's some people that that are just, you know, they're not gonna call us. They're not gonna reach out to us.

And so I think we work well with the Office of Community Services. There's sometimes when we refer people to them, And then there's sometimes when they have a family that like has a kid that wants to do a camp or you know, and so we kind of work together in that regard. It's because the city doesn't run the health department, it doesn't have, you know, I can see the benefit of having our own. I'm not sure where it might fit other than the mayor's office. But I don't know that the police department is the necessarily the right place for.

Yeah. I mean, it might be worth the conversation of public safety committee hearing or something. It's just it's been in my mind. And what you're saying makes perfect sense. There are people who don't want to call the police. The flip side is, if we put some more of these services within police, it might help people become more comfortable with that. So it's like I said, it's kind of a philosophical question. I think it was what we were gonna solve today. The reason it came to my mind is to give you a more specific question. When people are getting driven to trainers or driven to a dentist appointment, are those sworn officers doing that typically?

No. So we have some civilian community service specialists and in fact, I think well, he was converted this year. One of them was converted this year. So no, we're not

Gotcha. Yeah.

I'm sorry I did have one other question for you unless

I have one more.

Okay. To make sure we leave time for you. Actually you just go first.

So one last question that I had that I wrote down and then I couldn't find where I wrote it down. It has to do with going back to those the crime stats and calls that you get called out on. And what I found a few weeks ago was that, in 2023, the council passed legislation that talked, to short term rentals and that three strikes are out. And then I found a couple weeks ago that there's a disconnect because planning and zoning is telling us they only received three or four calls over the past year or incidents where a short term rental was had been called out on. But I know that that's not the case, but there's not a direct correlation between you guys going to a call on a short term rental issue and actually getting that to planning and zoning.

And how can we correct that and make that?

So that's been because it's not just short term rentals, but any rental property in the city of Annapolis, it's in the code that if there's a certain number of police responses that then planning and zoning can put them on notice that their, rental license can be revoked. So in practice, I hear from planning and zoning that they call and check with us when they're doing renewals. In I have dealt with community complaints at short term rentals and rental properties. And when that happens, I reach out to planning and zoning and let them know about the complaints. What I would like to see is us have a more robust information sharing where planning and zoning shares addresses with us of rental properties and short term rentals so that we can conduct regular checks whether they give us like a a list once a month of those that are being renewed that month and we go through and check or if there's some other way we can we can do it to facilitate the information going from us to them and from them to us.

You know, our records department does a lot of work like that and I and we have one open position right now. And I think we filled that open position that that that would be a great position to do that kind of work because there's other information sharing that people request that I think would be helpful for city departments and things like that.

So if that position was filled

That would increase our capacity and I think we could really set up a good system for how that would work between us and planning and zoning.

Is that position a sworn position or a civilian?

No, it's a civilian records specialist position.

Great. That would be fantastic. Because as we're moving forward, it would be nice to know that if a citizen has called with a complaint and police have responded that those are all tracked and recorded so that we actually have real data to work with when we're looking at making changes.

And like I said, planning and zoning says they do contact us when they're doing renewals. But I think it's helpful to have that information if we're getting multiple calls. Sometimes we don't know. It's, it's not so much with a short term rental, but maybe with a rental. It's not always clear that it's a rental. It's only when it's become a problem to us that we start checking records, state records to see like, oh, is it primarily does is it a primary residence? Or, you know, then I'll call over to planning zoning. Hey. Is this on your list as a rental? And sometimes it isn't a licensed rental, but it could be a rental. Mhmm. So it just puts it on right their radar as well. Thank you.

Could you help me understand the total cost this year for the drone program compared to last year? It looks like we had a couple different line items for it. We're talking also about storing footage. What's the if we put all those together, how much are we spending this year compared to how much were we spending last year? What are

we doing? Spend that much this year. It was mainly to get, supplies for our current drones that we have to get them up and running.

And I apologize. I wasn't clear. When I said this year, I actually meant FY '27. When I said last year,

I meant FY '26. Apologies. The we put in, I wanna say, 45,000 for drones for this year because we didn't know if how we were gonna go with the Axon contract. So that Axon that 45,000 kind of moves to the upgraded Axon that includes the drones. But at the time, we weren't sure in what direction we were gonna go.

We're still in you know, obviously, it's a big contract, and we're not close yet. But it is up for renewal August 1, and we hope to get it renewed by then.

So is it under the Axon contract? I'm sorry. So there's

He weren't sure if we were gonna do it separate or together, and we're gonna try and do it together in the contract.

Okay. So the line item for it is under that Axon contract enhancements. Got it. Okay. That I think that just about answers my question. Auditor Thorpe, you got anything else?

Yeah. Two questions. One again, following on Auditor Woman O'Neill. The short term rental collaboration sharing would be tremendous. One of the concerns that I've heard is the police are called to a situation at a short term rental. You solve the problem, whatever that is, and then go away. And that complaint does not get into the list. So and one of the complaints specifically would be for you to show up and it's a short term rental and it's not on the list. So is that the collaboration that you're talking about creating with planning and zoning so that you could report that?

That could be part of it. The the officer when they're going out to handle a call, their main concern is not whether this is a short term rental or not. It's whatever the call was. Now if the caller says, think it's a short term rental or it comes up in conversation, it might trigger the officer to to look and see if there's an issue that needs to be followed up with the planning and zoning. And that can be part of when we when we have this more robust information sharing that we make sure that officers, like, if you get wind, it's a short term rental.

Let planning and zoning know so they can check and see if it's on the list.

Great. Thank you. And then my final question goes back to patrols, bikes, and then presence in the tougher neighborhoods. So, I got it on patrols. On bikes, did I hear eight units or did I make that number up in my mind? How many bike units do we have that are that are possible to be out there?

I believe we have about 30. We have talking about the bikes? Oh, the bicycles themselves or officers?

First, the bike units. And then if we don't have enough officers, then the so I'm I'm talking about the complete. If you set all the bikes out right now, how many how many complete bikes do we have as the driving force? And then do we have enough?

I believe there are 12 bikes that we have right now and a kind of revolving 30 officers or so that are actively trained and, you know, can ride.

We don't usually there's a plan in patrol. So if you have people you you know, you tell your people, oh, you're bike certified. I want you out on the bike today. But it won't be like, I want all four of you out on your bike today at the same time, you know. So there's usually some planning involved with, you know, okay, if you stay in your post and you ride your bike, you know, you tell your post partner, like, I'll get to the call, but if you get there first, you know, that there's kind of those kind of arrangements to make because if we get an accident, a crash, right, a bicycle is not the greatest thing to be coming up on, to manage that scene.

Right. From my experience, you wanna ride along Yeah. The one police officer in that zone that we don't want him him or her on a bicycle. Right? So I so it the planning point to your point is it's over and above the one. Right? Okay. Yeah. And then, so 12 bikes is what we have. And then more than that officers, but it's over to the assignments.

Yeah. Okay. And then the last question is kind of the more intense part of that is presence in the higher risk areas. We currently don't have any present permanent presence, full time presence in those areas. Is that correct? And is that something that you would like to look to do in the future, or do you feel that's not the best use of your resources?

And I'll just say we're at time, so relatively short answer. Thank you.

So if you go to our website, an apples.gov/police, and go to the gun violence map, it shows you the areas where we have that most kind of violent activity. And it's not it's not isolated in in one or two neighborhoods. It's throughout. So if we were to post officers in neighborhoods twenty four hours a day, that would be very intensive when it came comes to staffing. I also don't think it's necessarily that effective because a lot of times there's not something happening in those neighborhoods.

They're just going about their day. So I like to see officers going in those neighborhoods and doing foot patrol and getting to know people in those neighborhoods, but I don't think we need to become kind of an occupying force in those neighborhoods. And I think when you assign an officer just to sit in a neighborhood, that's what they do. They just kinda sit there and they and and they're just kind of like the security guard in the mall parking lot, you know. So I I like to see them, you know, more.

We do activities. We, we have the officers come out. You know, officer Jones, he met this weekend. You know, he is really good at getting out and getting to know people, and that's what we wanna encourage with all of the officers.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thank you guys so much for being here. I really appreciate you taking time to be so detailed on everything. And with that, can I have a motion to recess until, let's say, until 11:00? We'll come back at eleven.

Motion to recess.

Second. All

those in favor please say aye. Aye. Director Crispin, the floor is yours.

Oh, well, good good morning. Good morning. Good morning. My name is Lasson Crispin. I am the acting director of the human resources department. As you know, I have been with the city for about six months and then about three little almost three months in this this role.

We're very grateful to

have you.

Thank you. So this is my first budget presentation. So I'm just going to get started. You want me to just go through the slides and Yeah.

So you got fifteen minutes. Okay. Just go through your slides and we'll try not to ask you questions, but might ask you one or two clarifying ones and then we'll ask you questions at the end. Sure. Sure.

Alright. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about our f our f y twenty six accomplishments and I'll just I just wanna clarify right now that these accomplishments primarily since I put the presentation together and didn't have the benefit of of the outgoing HR director, these are things that me and my team have done in the three months that I've held this this position. So we've expanded the use of our, of the NeoGov HRIS system, that's our HR information system, and we are implementing the full suite of tools so that we can streamline our recruitment and onboarding process. And that includes the benefits modules, the time and attendance modules along with the payroll modules. So we're working on all of that and then also updating some of the previous modules that have been implemented already.

Most recently, last week to be exact, we, completed the updated update of the city's intranet to streamline the employee complaint and submission process. The process, was available online to staff previously. However, we found it quite convoluted for them to be able to find exactly where to go. So we have streamlined the process, implemented a complaint button if you will on various pages of the Internet that allows staff to file a formal complaint electronically instead of bringing in a paper complaint which they sometimes do or sending it via email because it can get lost in translation. And with that complaint, the new complaint process, it automatically creates a document, a tracking tool and dashboard that allows us to be able to determine when the complaint came in, what the status of it is, and whether or not it's been resolved.

So we think doing that in a manner that's clear and provide provides clarity, consistency, we'll be able to, expedite the resolution of complaints. We also implemented a standardized career ladder framework. This framework is on the heels of the class and compensation study that was done a while back. While the various occupational series were developed, during that class and comp study that allowed for certain positions to have, multi tiers of different grades for promotion. There wasn't a systematic framework that went along with that.

So this framework will allow hiring managers, HR, the city manager, and all leadership across the city to be able to have a guideline if you will of how employees get promoted. And it speaks to, the the time frame that someone needs to, be in a particular position, the skills, knowledge, and abilities that they need to acquire, and then a matrix for determining whether or not it's that person is ready and if that higher level work exists instead of just arbitrarily promoting someone. The other thing that we're really excited about is the implementation of what we call our job description cover sheet. So in the past, descriptions would be written and they would miss certain criteria that we think is really important to, establish upfront such as the FLSA or FLSA, Fair Labor Standard Act designation whether the position is essential or quasi essential, whether the position, is, you know, the seventy hour or eighty hour, position. And so all of that information is captured on that job description cover sheet.

And, if the time ever comes that a job description needs to be able to be tweaked or edited in some way, that cover sheet because it's signed and saved in a PDF and, you know, stored on our internal job description, library is a sign that we need to pause and take a moment before just updating the job description. And so we think that that's going to help us with version control and making sure that we are creating job descriptions that are consistent, that aren't being edited and altered based on announcements that are posted. That's something that, we're really excited about. Another initiative that we recently, established is the FLSA checklist. And that's a tool that we're using to identify, and determine the the FLSA status or status for each position across the city.

And this is really important because getting that designation right, before you assign that designation to a particular, employee record is going to save us a lot of heartache later on if we ever were to pay someone based on the incorrect FLAWSA status. And then I also wanted to talk about our new electronic exit interview survey. So we've had an exit interview process in the past, but this one allows us to be able to send the exit interview link to departing employees. It's very robust, it's very comprehensive, but it allows us to drill down for the real reasons staff are vacating their positions. It's done anonymously.

We track the information over a period of a quarter and only share the information with senior leadership every quarter so that there is, you know, less of an opportunity to track it back to the person who submitted the, the exit interview survey. And what I'm hoping this will do is it will allow us to really determine why people are are leaving. You know, the questions, you know, like I said, are very comprehensive and it really tries to determine if there are systematic issues across the city that we need to take a look at. If it was, you know, solely based on, you know, a new career opportunity, you know, we can't really do much about about that. If it's based on pay, if it's based on something else that we need to take a look at as we are, trying to, retain top talent within the city.

Okay. So these are the performance measures and I'll tell you, I did have a conversation, with our acting city manager, Vicki, about the performance measures. I think that during this next period once we get through this, this budget cycle that it would be really really very prudent to take a look at some of these performance measures and the benchmarks that are here because I think we can do a lot better in identifying what's really important to the to the to the city. I think that, there's some information that I could share from HR that I've seen that I think we could would be much better for us to capture along with some of the information that came out of the roundtables that the mayor held. And we can, you know, move forward in, you know, the the upcoming years to to really get good benchmarks and really, track those benchmarks.

So for employee retiree and satisfaction, again, I just as as I mentioned, the the new the e form that we have for, for the exit surveys will be able to track, you know, those metrics. And then upcoming looking forward to 2027, we, you know, can plan to review those metrics and see if there are any systemic, issues across the city and we can deal with those. As far as training is concerned, I am, currently in the process of finalizing two contracts for citywide training. This training will, encompass a variety of different, subjects and they will be separated by senior executives, senior leadership team, supervisors, and then citywide staff. And then looking forward for FY 2027, there are a few courses such as our harassment course and conflict management that staff currently undergo when they initially are hired within the city, but there hasn't been an ongoing push for those types of, courses to be reoccurring.

And from a compliance standpoint, I think that we have to have those on an ongoing basis. Right now, we'd, the harassment, training is a forty five minute video training course. I think that's a great start, but I also think that we might want to at some point, couple that with in person or in person training, or live training that could go along with that. If not yearly, every other year would be appropriate. And then as far as benefits, right now we're taking a look at, a couple of benefits, benefits providers and we have determined that we might be able to find some savings there.

So we're talking right now with our insurance brokers to see what that would look like, the ramifications of that, how much the city could actually save, if it's feasible to, to do so this fiscal year, you know, when as of July 1. And then looking forward to 2027, we are have also in talks with our insurance brokers regarding the Family Leave Act that is approaching. Now that Family Leave Act will become effective, if you will, in January 2028, which will require paid leave at a thousand dollars per week for certain eligible staff. However, those premiums become due in January 2027. And depending on what vendor if we use the state of Maryland as our as our vendor for that insurance plan or another company, it will determine our cost for that.

Okay. The next several performance measures speak to workforce diversity. And so, as whole I would say that these our benchmarks and our accomplishments or measures, would say, I think we again this is this is another slide where I think we really need to change up what the benchmarks are and what our performance measures are to really if we're really interested in workforce diversity. But overall, we've been most of our announcements are posted through our HRS system, which is the NeoGov system. There are a lot of different, nuances and modules in that system that we haven't reached full capacity yet.

And so once we get to that point, which I suspect will be sometime this summer, we will be able to better track our overall, metrics as far as workforce diversity. And that could look that that would really give the city, a better look at, you know, how diverse we are in in hiring. We've we've we've expanded our outreach so that we are, you know, LinkedIn and, of course, linkedin, government.com, and, there's one more that escapes me right now. Then indeed to make sure that we are reaching a large audience. But I think we can do do better once we, tighten our performance measures up.

And then the last, performance measure deals with the increased applicant pool increased applicant pool within the neogov system. So historically, we were only at about 20% of applicants applying through our electronic system. We spent a lot of money for that system, so we want to make sure that we are using it and being as robust as possible. And so at this state, I can say that 80% of our applicants are applying through the system. And why that matters is we have a hub, a brain, a core HR is the hub or the brain of the system and it it it holds all of the the data, employee data.

And so when we allow applicants to apply outside of the system outside of our applicant tracking system, we're not capturing all of those metrics as far as time to hire or, you know, how efficient HR is. And so a lot of that is lost in in in in those numbers. And so and it allows us to better onboard that person because they we have all of their information there. So we're at a 80% rate and, you know, going into f y twenty twenty seven, my expectation is that we will be at a 100% and only allowing paper applications on a very rare, very rare basis. These are just some statistics I just wanted to share and it talks about the number of employees that we've hired over the last fiscal years and then those who have departed versus those who have resigned and retire.

And again, once our we are using our near gov system at full capacity, I think we'll be able to, have dashboards that show why people leave, how long they stayed, and then if we take the information from our exit surveys and compare it to these some of these metrics, we'll be able to have a better idea of our retention, our retention numbers and use that for succession planning. These are going to be blank. We don't have any personnel enhancements or non personnel enhancements to speak of.

You've been real easy for us.

Right. Right. We have a small budget.

That was time but just keep going. I think you're close. Oh,

This is just our our salaries over the past fiscal years. This and so I'm not sure if you have any questions for that but that's just a a snapshot of where we are and where we've been and where we're going. Right. And so here I just wanted to give a couple updates that, we are currently undergoing the interviews for the human resources director. We expect to conclude the first round by the end of this week, and we have a lot of great candidates that we're, interviewing.

So we're excited about that. And the HR department, we're constantly updating our internal policies and procedures to ensure that we have a a systematic way of doing business. We want to be able to stand on what we say for any decision that we make. We want it to be all compliance based and we want to be able to, have a point of reference as to why we're making the decisions with that we're making. I think I already mentioned how we streamlined the Internet. So I won't go through that again. And then those are the, titles of the upcoming citywide training courses that I previously mentioned. Thank you.

Wonderful. Thank you so much. And you're in a tough spot of presenting a budget when you've only been there for so long and and, so really appreciate you stepping up and doing such a good job with that.

Thank you.

Older Roman O'Neil, wanna start us off with some questions?

Great. I just have a few. Thank you very much. The first one is in regards to when you were talking about the updated the complaints page, the Internet. And that is citywide, so no matter which department they have access to Right. Lodge their complaint.

That's the citywide. Right. Alright.

So my second question is in regards to the electronic exit interview. And do you have data on the percentage of people that are actually doing that interview?

Not at this moment and we just implemented it the March. So that's that's very that's very new, the updated revised one. So not not yet, but we will once we start once they start coming in.

Okay. It's been my past experience that most people choose to just not do that. So, if there's some way that we are able to encourage people to do that.

Right. We we we do. And so I don't so I don't have the exact numbers, but I will tell you that people are completing it. So yeah. And we do let them know that that the the information is tallied like, you know, based on the the, responses that we get, we tallied and put it in a dashboard. But we also let them know that we don't share that like right away. So they know that this department said so it's it's it's not, you know, identifiable.

Okay and then my third question is in regards to your operating budget when I see the projected contractual services go from about 30,000 to 117 is that for the training, the citywide training or those two contract positions?

So actually, the prior director put that in, but contractual services, no. That would that I'm I'm thinking what she had in mind is we have currently a contractual two contractual staff members, or contractual staff that are assisting us with classification and compensation and some training material, internal training material, but not actually training.

So they increased from 30 to one seventeen. Do we know why?

It didn't increase from 30, the projected amount is 30,000. The actual budget was 100 and fifth a 115,700. Okay.

So we didn't use those funding?

Yeah. So projected for FY '26, this is based off of December 31, I believe. There may be some it's just a it's a projection so it could be adjusted. Since then, recently, we've had a conversation of different initiatives that she wants to use that funding for. So it looks like she's gonna use the full adjusted budget amount for FY '26.

Okay.

That answers my question.

Does that answer your question?

I think so. I was just worried that, you know, we went in the actual in the f y twenty five was '26. We budgeted for, you know, up to a 115. The projection right here looks at 30, so we're gonna spend $80,000 in the next two months or

So I will I will say this that from my understanding that the city has not fully used its training budget to its full or at all over the past two years, and we are really behind in training. We desperately need leadership training, debiasing the workplace conflict resolution based on some of the internal things that I'm seeing within HR. We we need that money for training and training is is very, very expensive. I don't see that. Yeah, I don't see that we have historically in over at least the past couple of years had any type of training. So I think we're in a catch up phase at this point. Okay.

And then my last question was you talked about having, you know, putting together systematic frameworks for as people are hired, adding to the job description. I'm kind of shocked that we haven't had that before as an HR department. As far as, like, the entire package is basically, like, standard operating. So everybody that comes through is basically onboarding will be standard across the board no matter whether you're coming in and working for the mayor's office or working for parks and rec or is is that what you're saying that that is?

So I'll I'll touch on two of those two two different things. So the career ladder framework that I mentioned is only for positions. Say there's an accountant one, two, and three position and you get hired into the accountant one position. How does a supervisor of that employee make the determination that that person is ready to go to the accountant too? That's not just, oh, at the one year mark, we're just gonna promote you.

That's that's that's not how it should be done. So what what we have done is we've created a framework to say, how does someone, anyone get promoted from the one to the two and to the three? What are some of the things that we look at? Well, first of all, is there a need in that department for the higher level work? We just don't promote people arbitrarily because they sat in a role for a year.

So is there the higher level work? Does it exist? And how do we know if it exists? Well, that supervisor should tell us that it exists and it should match the job description, the information that is in that higher level job description. And so that accountant one who's functioning at, you know, the optimal, stage at that particular job, but is doing some other things.

Maybe they're leading project or they're showing initiative and they got a fully successful rating and they are taking on extra responsibilities that already exist at that higher level. And they've been in that role for a minimum of one year and got a fully successful rating. The and budget has approved that that money exists to promote that person, then they can be promoted. But there's a matrix surrounding that so that, you know, not that I'm saying that this would happen here, but that a manager wouldn't promote this person and not that person, and they're using a different set of criteria to promote people. But it's all in in alignment, and there has to be a concurrence with, that supervisor, the director of that department, and then HR would sign off on it.

So that's the framework I'm talking about regarding the career ladder. But back to your point, about the hiring process for everyone. So our neogov system, when people apply through the system as we're trying to get them to do, does take everyone through a similar process, right, to get to get hired. That process can look really different depending on the department though. Like police and fire, they have exams and so it it it varies.

And then, like our recs and parks department, for example, their part time staff that come in for the summer and they might be a lifeguard. We're not gonna send them through an orientation because they don't get benefit. So it it does vary a little bit depending on the type of position that you're coming in for. But we're trying to have it as as streamlined and as uniform as possible like you mentioned.

Okay. So my last follow-up then is, so in f y twenty six, we with the comp and pay plan that we approved as a council, and we approved, the different levels for each the career ladders for each department. But we did all of that without the actual matrix to say one to the when will that be completed? It's pretty much complete now. I have to run it by the city manager to have her bless it and the mayor or whomever, and they can, you know, let us know we we can implement it. So we at this point, we have not promoted anyone through the career ladder process.

That's not to say because if you if you think of it this way, the career ladder process is a noncompetitive promotion, right? Once you're on a career ladder to get to the higher steps, you don't have to compete and apply on our our website for it. But that's not to say that you couldn't just post a standalone accountant through position and people could compete for it to get that role. But we haven't opened up the career ladder program just yet, but we're we're on the cusp of doing that any day now. Okay. Thank you.

That's all.

Alderman Thurp, you're up.

Thank you, mister chairman. And thank you, miss Christman. I appreciate what you're doing. Thank you. So on slide four, you talked about 80% going through neogov and and the goal is 100%. Why don't you just direct that right now, that 100%? It seems like that's a process improvement that you could just require all new applicants to go through neologove.

So we're having those conversations with our directors. So what's what happens is in some of our departments, recs and parks in particular, is that some of the candidates or applicants that, come in to apply for those, jobs may have, not have access to a laptop or computer or they have some sort of learning learning challenge. And so the staff members have informed us that they're actually helping them fill out the applications and things of that nature. So what we are proposing is that we have certain days within HR because we could that they can come over and we can assist them on in our computer lab to help them apply, for the application there. We're also we've also asked if they could have laptops or iPads at their at the different sites around the city so that they could apply that way.

But we are working on a a QR code that will for those who do have access to a phone, we're working on establishing a QR code. That when and this would just be this would be for for anyone actually. So we have the QR codes and we have them around, you know, in HR, around the different departments where the walk in applicants come to. They can select the QR code and it would take them right into the portal where they could do the application on their phone if they don't have access to a computer at home.

You're moving to a 100%. It's just gonna take

you a

little while.

Yes. So in the thank you. In the budget document, you have $80,000 for a summer intern program. Can you tell us about that summer intern program, please?

Sure. So the summer intern internship program, we just announced it, I believe, on Friday, and I think the announcements will close May. So it's 24, this year, we're going to be able to sponsor 24 interns and we have two different age groups. We have the ages 15 through 17 and then we have, I think it's seven 18 through 24. And so the, the internship program is designed to help with resume resume writing, career exploration, interview prep, and just learning about the city, city of Annapolis, different departments and things.

And so we take them through an orientation period of one week where they come in and they get all of the basics of foundations of how the work world works, if you if you will. There are case studies and scenarios. There's mock interviews. We have all of the different departments that are participating in the program come in and give a presentation on, their department and the type of jobs that they can, have once they, you know, go through that one week internship, introduction period. And then they actually go out and get real live work experience in the different departments.

And each department, depending on what they do, they might go to finance or come to HR and they learn about that specific discipline within that department. The younger group, they they do a lot more of, a lot of hands on learning. They go around and they actually get to take tours of the different departments and see how, like, the the, public works, like the water plant works and learn about career. So it's all about career exploration. It's all about, giving them that first boost on their resume, something that might be outside of the retail realm where they can actually say they have act had, you know, an internship in an office environment.

And that, I know that helped me years ago when I worked as an intern at the Library of Congress through a program and that, you know, sometimes can be the difference in getting your foot in the door for, you know, a position that better aligns with your, whatever your college coursework is.

Thank you. So 24 students.

So 24 students, but we also we also pay for two of Rex and Parks has to hire two, what do I wanna say, leads for that for that program. So they they lead that program for the younger group in particular. And so we also pay for their their hourly salary. And none of this is full time. I believe it's it's four four hours a day for all of the interns.

Okay. Yes. Thank you.

You're welcome.

New new employee orientation program. Who leads that on your team? And do you measure, you survey people who finish that and, receive those results?

Oh, great great question. So one of our HR associates leads that currently right now and it's it's sometimes supplemented by one of our HR benefits administrators who will come in and give additional information in particular to the police and fire because their benefits are a lot more complex and involved than some of the other other city and city employees. And that's that survey that you mentioned is not in effect now, but that's something we're working on. That survey and then a survey in general that all of the HR staff will have on their email tagline are two surveys that we have in process to implement, but they're not quite ready yet.

When do you think the orientation timeline will be implemented?

The orientation?

The orientation survey will

be I

would have to check on that and see when we are with that. So part of that is

For the record, just putting that as a report back, please.

Yeah. Just get back.

Okay. The orientation survey timeline readiness. Okay. I can get that to you.

And then my final question is what is your department's policy on overtime?

My department does not offer overtime and so the FLSA document that I mentioned that we created is something that should be done for each let me go back a little bit. So someone mentioned the class and comp study that you had several years ago, and out of that came a lot of job descriptions. So what I have seen are single job descriptions. It's just a job description with the knowledge, skills, duties, minimum qualifications, and maybe some work environment information on that. To me, that falls short of what a job description should entail.

That's why I created the cover sheet with all of that ancillary information that's very important that goes along with it. A full job description in my mind also contains a flosser checklist. That checklist is what is used to determine whether or not that position is eligible, whether it's exempt or nonexempt of the of the overtime rules. You should not absolutely should not be checking a box to say something someone position, not the person, but the position is exempt or nonexempt without a criteria for capturing that. It just can't be something you pull out of a hat.

So that and then along with something else that we're we're finalizing is a checklist to determine whether a position is essential, nonessential, or quasi essential. All of those documents are the cover sheet, the job description, the quasi essential versus essential, and the FLSA. That is a complete job description in my mind because it has all of those documents with it. It tells you why you made the designations you made. It goes the the FLAWSA is is law. So there's it goes back to the CFR, so I can't just designate that. So long story short, no one in HR they don't meet any of the criteria on that FLAWSA checklist, so no one in HR earns overtime.

Alright. Thank you very much, mister chairman. That concludes my questions.

It was, I I just I really appreciate what you were just talking about. The idea of creating these checklists seems really helpful. I was having a kind of impromptu conversation with somebody maybe a month ago about why is this employee exempt and that employee not exempt. And so it'd be really interesting for us at some point to be able to go and look at those and say, that's that's why. So thank

you. Yes.

I wanna dig in to this contract services breakdown. And, again, apologies if I repeat some of the questions you asked. I'm trying not to. But fundamentally, what I'm trying to understand is there's a $117 $117,000 budgeted for this, and listed for us is about $3,234,000 dollars here. So maybe it's more a question to miss Turner, but whoever wants to answer it. What are the when we see, like, contract services and professional services, how much of of those is going to each thing within them?

Well, so for for right now, I I can I mean, they the budget team can speak too, but I have two contract individuals that are working for me right now that are helping us with some of our initiatives? So far, we spent 15,000 on one for this fiscal year, and the other one was budgeted for 3,000. However, I've asked for an additional 14,000 for the person on our class, classification and compensation, initiative because it's really we need a full time person, quite frankly. But I've asked for some additional money for that. So that encompasses about $30.33 or about that $33,000.

However, that other 70,000 or $80,000 is is budgeted in there. I think that, again, the prior director put that money in there, but that money will absolute is absolutely needed for the the citywide training to keep us in compliance that we have not had for the past several years.

Okay. Okay. I think it's finally used. I'm starting to understand, and apologies for being thick. No. No. But the so the 32,500 for contract services does line up with what we've got here in our budget book. That makes sense. It's the 80,800 that I'm trying to understand what is

That's going part of it. The two positions that she's speaking of, that's where those expenses are allocated to.

Okay. Gotcha. Those two positions and then also trainings.

Training.

How much do we spend on drug testing? And where would that be in the budget? When people come on, gotta go, they get tested, presumably the city pays for that. How much are we spending on that?

So it's and some departments, it's split out. Rex and Park, two of their divisions has, drug testing. I can look it up, but I don't think that it is more than 11,000 off the top of my head, but I can look up to give you the what we actually budget. But I can say from budget experience and budget versus actual that we've actually reduced it over time because we never have reached what we had budgeted.

Gotcha.

Yes.

Yeah. I have the file pulled up. So for pre employment drug and alcohol screens, it's 20,500 in HR's budget.

In HR. Okay. Thank you. And then you're saying there's also some in Rex and Parks? Interesting. Is there a reason we don't centralize that?

I honestly can't say why it's been like that. I don't know. That's just how it is built into the budget, how it has been.

Do you know Mr. Palakkul in past years do we come anywhere close to that $20,000 figure or you can't see?

Say to that level of detail because within this employee physical exams, you've got pre employment physicals, drug and alcohol screens, psychological evaluations, independent medical evaluations, and then CDL physicals. And so I think I don't know if we have the level of detail to break it down into those individual line items.

Got it. Okay.

Yeah. And it's hard to say because of the vacancies as well because they put funding in there based off of the positions that are included within the budget. And then some of that is just annual screenings for, I believe, fire and police as well.

Gotcha. So, yeah, which makes sense and we we can't change. So that $20,000 figure is not just drug screening. It is all those things you just listed.

Kinda. We do have it in the budget as its own, like, the detailed budget that we work out with HR as an individual line item. I just don't know if in our accounting system we have it at that level of detail, Capri. Do you know do you know if like the within the individual HR budget, we have those five different things as individual lines, but they're all part of the employee physical exams. I just didn't know if within our accounting system we have the individual detail or if it's all rolled up.

It's all rolled up.

Yeah, it's going be all rolled up in the accounting system.

Thank you. Apologies if you covered this on the slides but I don't think I saw it. In our budget book, have something that says social media program implemented as a performance measure. Was that on the slides? I'm or

It was. So

And can you just explain to us what that is?

So

Ah, there. See, was under workforce diversion. Yes.

So right there, these these are one of the the benchmarks that I was talking about that and and performance measures that I think needs to be tweaked. The only thing that we have done in in the three months that I've been in this role is ensure that we're using other social media platforms to to advertise our our positions.