Human Resources & Information Technology Committee - Regular Meeting

I'd like to call to order tonight's meeting of the Human Resources and Information Technology Committee for Wednesday, October 22, 06:30 p. M. Please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. Pledge allegiance

to the flag of The United States

Of America and to the

republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with the liturgy and justice for all.

Thank you. Roll call of membership, let the record show that Alder Stansel Martin is absent and excused. All the rest are present. We have no public hearings and oh, wait. Moving on to item number 20 Five-thirteen32, approval of the minutes from the previous meeting dated 09/10/2025.

Motion to approve. Second.

Motion and a second. Are there any questions, corrections, changes? There being none, all those in favor please signify by saying aye.

Aye.

We have no public hearings or appearances, so we move on to we don't have any action items tonight. And my apologies to the rest of the committee that we don't have any action items, but thank you very much for being here for the important discussions about the departmental budgets. So we'll move on to information items and begin first with item 20 five-thirteen 33, the 2026 Human Resources departmental budget. Director Rachman, would you like to address that quickly?

Thank you.

Thank you.

And just for the committee's purpose, that chairperson Herzog and I did talk about information items. We don't generally bring them forward without action items. But this is obviously a big one, setting budget and then making sure that this committee has an opportunity to ask questions before budget Saturday as a committee. So just wanted to put that out there. That's kind of been our tradition.

So what I'll do is I'll just kind of give you an overview of like the big items of what's in our budget, what we represent as a department. I want to go through just a few highlights from 'twenty five because they really do feed into 'twenty six as to what we're looking ahead for to in 2026. So the HR budget is broken down into three core areas. HR compliance administration is core number one. Core number two is talent acquisition and retention.

And then core number three is talent management and development. So just to give you an idea of like the three different areas, HR compliance and administration is the largest area dollar wise of our budget. This is where we do things like fringe benefits administration. And we've been talking a lot about health insurance through the years. Right?

So even though the dollars for that benefit are not under HR, they're under like a finance budget item, The HR department is responsible for administering the fringe benefits. This is the area of the budget where we do wellness programming. It's mental health, physical health, emotional health, financial health, etcetera. Compensation administration, labor negotiations, and legal compliance. Then the second area is talent acquisition retention.

This one's a little bit more self explanatory. This is recruitment, selection, and then strengthening workplace culture. And then finally, talent management development. This is like onboarding new employees, citywide training, leadership development, and succession planning. So the bulk of what you will see in our budget from a dollars cents is really related to staffing of the HR department to carry out those functions for the entire organization because we are a service department and we service all city departments.

A few highlights from 2025. From a department standpoint, we continue to go through transition. We've been going through transition for several years with retirements. Our deputy director retired back in February. I had a good twelve month notice on that. Plus, I knew it was coming before then. So and then I did have an overhire that was approved at committee and councils that that helped with that transition in onboarding our new employee. We've met, you'll meet again on Saturday, budget Saturday, she's outstanding. We spent a lot of time in 2025 also realigning team roles now that we have new players in our department. And we're really intentional on development plan.

So with new employees, if someone's now going to be the focus on Tyler Munis, getting them to that specific training or NeoGov when it comes to recruitment or talent management. On a more global basis, for the entire organization, we went back and we're working with departments to make sure they do stay interviews with their employees. It's important. It's better to do a stay interview than an exit interview. Cultural initiatives, a variety of them.

And then improving our onboarding process for new employees, we'll be doing quite a bit of focus in 2026 on that process as well. Other things that happened in '25, we settled a new labor agreement with the fire union that was about six to seven months worth of work. And then we initiated a side letter agreement with Valley Transit. And this is something general manager McDonald and I and others brought to the union to say we've been unable to recruit mechanics. Right so we'd like to talk about making that position market comparable and they worked we were able to fill that position and then we created a shop for a person position which was like a career development plan for Valley Transit.

Just a few other highlights from 2025 health insurance. I didn't talk about this. I wouldn't be doing my job because that's an over $10,000,000 budget. So kind of the state of the union of like right now, we're operating at about a 90% loss ratio. So what does that mean? So for every dollar that we put in that budget, we're spending about $0.90 And I will tell you that's really good. That's where you want to be. You don't want to be over one, because it means you've spent more than money you put away. And if that loss ratio is too low, it means you over budget it, right? So to put that in dollars and cents of like, if we have a $10,000,000 budget, that means we still are about $1,000,000 under what we've budgeted.

But before we do a happy dance, that can change really, really quickly. The last three months of the year tend to be the highest claims of the entire year. Folks have already met their deductible, their out of pocket costs, or they put procedures off. But right now, for 2025, we're operating really, really well. Some of the things that have helped with that has been the proximal program we talked about, incentive program, prudent Rx, and then our connecting care clinic, which is running really, really well with the school district.

Our average two year premium increase, we had a 3% increase going into '25. We'll have a 4.52% increase for '26. That's 3.75 average over two years. Okay? And these numbers that I'm going share with you are from our broker USI trend, which is like a fancy word for inflation.

Medical trend in '25 was 9%. Medical trend in '26 is 10%. So even if you're doing all the things right, you're expected to have increases just based on inflation. So things are running right, but we also had to make some plan design changes going into '26. I would not describe them as overly disruptive, but starting at 11.3% increase and bringing down that to a very manageable level, we had to make some plan design changes.

Looking ahead at '26, the retirement outlook is still a concern. Reported a number of years ago about 60% of our workforce was eligible to retire currently or within ten years. That's at about 46% right now. Last year, I think on budget Saturday, I reported 44%. So that number is kind of hovering, but it doesn't mean we can't plan.

And that's what is important about succession planning. Having ongoing development plans with departments, continuing with our leadership program Thrive that you guys have heard over and over. One of the questions from our alders alder person was how many participants have gone through that program? And the answer is 89 participants. And a lot of our promotions, whether it's to deputy director, director, or just supervisor, higher level supervision or supervisor position, have been a graduate of that program.

We're also looking at potentially in 2026 creating an aspiring supervisors program. So someone who wants to be a supervisor, is not ready to take on that higher level position quite yet of helping them get into some sort of academy that can be ongoing development throughout the year. So we're working on that. We'll continue to work on engagement activities. We know our workforce likes those social activities like the annual picnic, dip day.

I know we've invited our some of our all of our council members, our Christmas party, etcetera. And then we're really looking at making sure that new employees feel like they belong and connect immediately, right? So it's one thing for HR to do an onboarding where we send you your new paper hire work. We sit down with you on day one, but the real connection's at the department level. So we're looking at a thirty, sixty, ninety day connection. So that would be ongoing into 2026. And I have to mention we're going to continue to leverage the tools that we've been given. One is the Baker Tilly system. That's the compensation study. That's a really important tool for us to make sure we respond to the market when it comes to compensation.

Our learn system that system is paid by CBNC. But basically what that system allows us to do is roll out our employee training through like an online system and to be able to track it. And because of that, and the fact that they're paying that cost, it allows us to then invest our money back into things like succession planning and thrive and aspiring supervisors program without increasing our budgets significantly. We're looking at our recruitment process, trying to have more customized brand driven approaches. So we're going to go back after branding in 2026.

And then also look at how we can better use interns and possible apprenticeships for hard to fill vacancies. So that's going to require a lot of department outside of HR commitment as well. And then making sure that we partner it with the right technical college or universities. And then finally, of course, health insurance will be something that we will we do annual strategic planning. We do quarterly meetings.

And then we also do monthly claims review. And there's a lot of in betweens as well outside those meetings. We also have Teamsters negotiations with Valley Transit coming up in 'twenty six and negotiations with police coming up in 2026. A lot going on, but a lot of positive things. That's really about all I had to say. But I'm happy to answer questions that you have.

Excellent. Alder Woolf?

Thank you, Chair. So first, I really like the idea of the leadership academy that you're doing. I benefited from one of those suggested by other person in Zealand. I think that they're uniquely and very beneficial for people to go through for many reasons. My question is we have a more status quo budget as we've had for the last five years.

I'm going to ask Cory the same question too. Do you see anything in the 2026 through 2030 budget that might come up that might give us an issue down the road? I know that we can only do so many status quo budgets until we hit a wall where we have an issue, and I'd basically like to know about that issue before we get there.

I think without some of the tools that we've been provided, like the compensation system, without the learn system, without going to you having an online application process for recruitment, All of our performance reviews are now done through and also it's the same product as Learn. It's just a spin off. Without those, we'd probably be there right now. But what we're able to do is take our time and our dollars from like a trading standpoint and put it back into other things because we can still deliver the required things in a different way that's more efficient. So right now, I don't have anything that I would bring forward and say, if I just had this or I need this today.

I think bigger picture, the concern would be at 2,030 is wages and benefits for the organization and how sustainable is that when there's increases year after year. But every organization's faced with that year after year. But I hope that answers your question.

Yes, thank you. And sorry, Director Popp. I accidentally called you by your first name. I shouldn't do that. Sorry.

Director Raschmann, would you consider this an actual status quo budget? I mean, I heard a lot of things that you worked on and changed, especially in regards to the health insurance program, I not necessarily consider the status quo.

And I would agree. Don't consider it status quo. I think it's just redeploying our resources in a different way and also knowing that we no longer just talk about wages and benefits, we talk about total rewards, which includes culture work and recognition. So we're just deploying ourselves differently, more efficiently because of some of those tools. But I don't consider it to be a status quo budget.

And that to me makes it sound like you're kind of going with what changes might come along without having them leap out in front of

us. Correct.

Excellent. Thank you. Alder Hinton.

Thank you, Chair. I like what you were saying about the internship program. One thing and I like the idea of the cost savings that could be realized through that. I also think it's a great way to bring new people on, develop talent, and be prepared to fill vacancies in the future. One thing I would encourage the city to do is to start getting ahead on those internship programs early in 2026, because I know I had some people in my district who were interested in interning at the city at no cost.

And there was no information for them to find. So if you can get that out to the auditors, I think it could help the city and help you kind of fill some of those roles and get a lot more work done in the coming summer.

Great. Thank you.

Alder Jones? Again, I think culture is a huge thing that is overlooked by a lot of organizations. I love what you all have done with culture. The City Star Awards every year are very special to watch people get awards and their family there. It's wonderful. Also, I am so excited about DIP Day tomorrow. Thank you for including the elders in this. I think it's a great opportunity to get to know everyone outside of this room. I am so excited. I have three dips to bring, so I'll see you tomorrow.

All right.

Thank you.

She's a dip overachiever. Anyone else have any questions? Oh, Alderman Wolff.

I just want to kind of clarify what I meant by status quo. More like without loss of major services or what the things that we do and restructuring that changed, but more what I mean is that we didn't lose major battles. So that's kind of what I meant by that. I just wanted to put that out there.

Thank you. Any other questions, concerns, anybody? All right. We'll move on then, please, to if I indulge the committee, I would like to move to twenty five-thirteen thirty five, the 2025 amended budget corrections for IT. And that will be Director Popp speaking to that, please.

So this will be a really fast information item here. So this is in regards to the memo I included in the packet. And in here, I just I restated what I had said on August 13, the midyear report, and that was that the ERP financial system hadn't been updated with carryovers yet. In the time it took me to type and submit this memo, the carryovers have been entered into the ERP system. So just want to correct the correction before we move on. And the the values I have in the accounts below that recognize the carryovers, those, of course, are still correct, they're relevant to the budget pages you have in front of But I did want to make I did want to note that ERP is updated with carryovers on it at this time.

Excellent. Thank you. Then we can move on, please, to item number unless anyone has any questions. All right. Then we'll move on, please, to item 20 five-thirteen 34, the 2026 Information Technology Department budget. Director Popp?

Thank you. I'll hit the highlights for the budget, and then I'll open it up for questions. This is probably the largest budget increase I had year over year since arriving at the city. And I'll tell you exactly why that is and where that's come from, where the majority of those costs are. Before I get into that, I'm going to hit page 90 with a discussion of the significant 2025 events because a lot of the budget increases come in part from these.

And that is because although twenty twenty twenty four was a a slow year as far as ERP progress, I'm not sure we actually even had a new ERP module come live in '24. We did have three of them come live in 2025. So everything kinda came together at once this year, and we're not even to the end of the year. But we had enterprise asset management go live. That's all of the city's inventories and assets go into the system and workflows and maintenance and whatnot around those assets.

We also had the content management system go live earlier this year. I think that was February. I think asset management was March. And then in July, of course, the utility billing system went live after close to two years of of conversion time on that, somewhere in between there, maybe twenty months or so. We also had another big event was we transitioned in in this part here. This is written early, months ago. I had noted that we transitioned public libraries, city hall, parks, facilities, etcetera, over to the RingCentral system. We replaced the old phone system. That's been done citywide now. So it's listed here as individual departments.

It's citywide. It's all departments. It's all divisions. That is complete. All right. So that was 2025 accomplishments. The first sub organization in IT is actually administration. That's a little boring. That is basically myself, my deputy, and the administrative assistant we share with human resources. If you look at the dollars in there, if you look at the program narrative, it's just flat.

Nothing's really happening in there other than the standard salary increase. So if it's Okay with you, I'm going to move on to the next sub org, which is the one of the busier the busy $1 wise for this for 2026. And that's the business unit we refer I refer to as development. This isn't a traditional IT development department in which we're writing custom code and that type of thing. This team is really developing workflows, reports, and dashboards on the ERP system and then any system that's ERP adjacent, such as the website, the portions that take payments online.

So this is where the most sizable budget increase is for 2026. One of the reasons is when we're transitioning as we were for EAM and utility billing, those module costs, those recurring module costs go into a project fund. They come out of a project fund while that system is rolled out. When that system goes live, those costs then flow into the operational costs. So we got a really big hit in '26 on those as all of those kind of peaked at once going into next year.

The other thing that's happening, there's a brand new module budget for 2026 and that's enterprise permitting and licensing. And that's a hefty module. If you look on page 95, you'll see that's listed right at the bottom of that software support column on the left side. That's a 3 figure module alone. So that is a significant amount of the cost of this entire ERP budget.

So you'll see we jump from $2.55 to $4.24 on that budget line item. It is it is all ERP that's doing that that bump there. It's a little bit of a sticker shock, especially because the I series has virtually relatively no cost to it. It's a low 5 figure cost compared to the ERP, which is, you know, closing in at half $1,000,000 here at $4.24. So that is the ERP side of the budget.

And as you can see just with the other columns, there's not much increases in anything else except for the software support line item. That brings us to the third IP sub organization, and that's operations. So that's what most people think of when they think of IT. So that's going to be PC breakfix, server breakfix, networking, that type of thing. We have some increases in here and some offsets in here. Consulting services is down significantly if you see that. That is due to the RingCentral system. So I think it was a $40,000 line item that we had reserved in consulting just for I'm sorry. It was a I think maybe it was only 18. It was 18 in consulting.

I think it was 40,000 in software support to support the old systems. That was licensing and consulting we needed for repair on that. That's replaced by an $85,000 line item in software support for the RingCentral system. So those other costs go out in support and it comes down to $85,000 in the software support budget. That's a little confusing. If you have questions on that, we can can deal with that after I'm after I finish up here. Equipment repairs and maintenance goes up a little bit. That's primarily the Cisco Meraki licensing. That's related to a Ethernet switch replacement project that's going on. As that's rolled out, those annual costs go up on that because that service is cloud based for those switches.

And I already addressed software support. So that is the major changes to this one. Otherwise, we're pretty much flat on this one as well. We have a couple of projects, a few projects in the in the operations side. We're gonna install a direct responder emergency system here at city hall.

That's a it's typically commonly known as a panic button system. So this particular one, it's and it's it was developed with with the police department, or the idea came from Aplin Police Department. And that is the panic button at city hall will actually, rather than ring a 911 or or ring a central station somewhere, this actually broadcasts out to all police radios. So anything they're wearing, anything in the cars, it would just basically be in all hands to to City Hall on that system. So we're excited to roll that one as well.

Do we not, Direct Pop, have one of

those buttons?

We don't have a panic button right now at this time. You'll have one at the desk up there, not yet. Our old panic button system we had to retire was was Windows based. It was it didn't work when we came in. When the Appleton Police Department came in to do the testing, it would often fail. It was a USB connection. It just really was not it didn't work. It's just that simple. Didn't work.

And that's hardly helpful.

This new one will work. That's it. That's really the highlights and the budget. So I can take questions in regards to the IT budget for 'twenty six.

Thank you. Aldeperson Jones.

I noticed that it had said that this is the second consecutive year of reduced ticket volume. I'm guessing this is a good thing. Is that due to the new technology? Or what would you attribute that to?

Yeah. It is a good thing. Because for if you recall, some of you have been on the committee for a while. This was actually kinda going up year over year over year. And it was kinda getting to a point of, like, why are tickets going up? So yeah. So for the second year in a row, we're seeing tickets drop. A big part of this is it's just cloud services. So they just they don't break as often. You're you're on the we the city, we're on the newer versions or the newest versions more frequently.

It's also due in part to just how we how we roll out items in the department, how we roll out technology. So we have standard operating procedures. Desktops, mobile devices are a lot more locked down, require admin rights to compared to, say, pre 2022. If we go back to the invasion of Ukraine all the way back in 2022, CISA had a sort of an all hands alert, shields up, they called it, where any municipalities that weren't using multifactor authentication and didn't have admin rights locked down on the desktop, they earned all local governments and state governments to do that. So we complied, we did that within a matter of months.

That's made a very big deal, had a very large effect on people loading bloatware and freeware and stuff that it was kind of anyone could do what they wanted to prior to that. I really that's a major effect for us. So the system desktops, the mobile devices, they're stable. They don't change without IT being involved in that change. So there's a there's a big a big part of that.

We're also on the ERP system. So we have a sort of shrink-wrap ERP system versus the I series that requires a lot of to custom fixes because that system was written by in house programmers. That's another piece of it. The other thing that doesn't necessarily show up on just that sort of line item is not only have we noticed a reduction in tickets, we've noticed sort of a migration in the types of tickets. So we divide them up into incidents, problems, requests, that type of thing. So we see incidents and problems decrease, we see requests increase. And what's the difference? So an incident is gonna be something broke, need to fix it. I can't print, I can't email, something like that. We fix it on the spot.

A problem is sort of a a longer duration, might take days or weeks to fix. We may have a workaround in place. So we see those decrease. We see requests go up, and the requests are, can I have a hub card in the ERP that shows me this dashboard item? Can I have a custom report that generates this type of data for the asset management system? So I think we're doing more in regards to building efficiencies and workflows and reports and dashboards more so than just fixing stuff that breaks.

And I would not sell you or your staff short. I think there's a much better process since the start of your tenure that tickets are processed much more efficiently.

We couldn't even measure tickets prior to my SOFR. We didn't have a help desk system. Yeah.

Thank you. Other person here.

One thing when you were kinda going through all the ways to log issues is it felt like you're missing something like a a known issue. Like, do you have the ability to kind of log issues that are frequently happening so your team can tie all these incidents up to something that they know is frequently happening so you're not logging same incident over and over and over again?

Yep. That would be a problem. Okay. That would be a problem to get yes. So we use I use the I use IT governance information technology service management framework. And I use ITIL, which is a standard. It's out of The UK. I'm certified in it. So when I talk specifically about different types of tickets we have, like incidents, problems, events, projects, that comes right out of that framework. So it's built on principles that do exist.

May I continue?

You may.

One other item you and I emailed back and forth about when we kind of went over the budget was the email security appliance Mhmm. Budget amount. $70,000 seemed pretty high to me. So I was wondering if and I won't state the name of the program because you identified that it was something we were trying to avoid for security purposes. Have we looked at alternatives to what we're using? And for your reference, that's on page 97 at the bottom of the left column under Network Security Support.

I'm all turned around on my budget page here.

It's too many.

Right. Okay. So, yeah, that is that appliance, that does more than just email filtering at this time. So we did upgrade that appliance. We upgraded the software on it. So it does do your standard email filtering, checks it for viruses, you know, filters out spam, just your basics, probably what you think about with an email filter. This has several bolt ons. One of the bolt ons is we used to have a separate line item on here for phishing training. Well, this appliance now has that built in. So we can run anti I shouldn't say phishing.

So anti phishing. So we can run anti phishing campaigns in the software or on that appliance rather than have a separate software that does that. So that has been rolled into this as well, and it does all the tracking and reporting on that anti phishing. Another thing that it does, it will allow us to proactively remove reported emails. So if you were to get an email that you felt was a phishing email or was malicious, you have a button you can click in Outlook that says think this is malicious.

Well, has a back end to it that we can program it. It's another add on that'll say, Hayden reported this. We're going to pull this out of anybody else's mailbox that received it. So if we were blasted, you know, with 400 malicious emails in the hopes that even one person would open it once it's reported, we can pull that out of the inboxes. Another feature on it is it sounds odd that it's it's on an email appliance, but it shows just sort of the creep that these these products make is this actually will also back up our entire o three sixty five presence, all of our documents that are sort of our OneDrive, our SharePoint. This appliance has a cloud service, and it it backs up those documents. So that was added as well.

That that's really intriguing. So you're backing it up with an email service and, like, everything is backed up in there from PowerPoint to OneNote to Outlook?

That's correct. Yeah. And it does versioning on those as well.

And what's the purpose of an email system that backs up o three sixty five? Because I thought the whole point of o three sixty five was all your documents are living in the cloud. So backing up things that live in the cloud on an email service seems like an unnecessary redundancy to me.

So it's okay. So it's backed up by Microsoft. Okay. This would be our backup. So if we had a specific backup we wanted to go to, say, rather than Microsoft's backup is gonna protect us in the event of an attack on Microsoft or an attack on our organization within our Microsoft tenant. K? So they're gonna be able to restore it to a point in time. By running our own backups, we can actually go back and help say say we have an employee resign and those documents aren't transferred to the new employee. They're just sort of forgotten. The off boarding doesn't go well.

The employee's email is deactivated. The documents aren't transferred. Forty five days later, all those documents are deleted out of OneDrive. They're gone. Microsoft isn't gonna allow us to go back and get those. They only do versioning for so long. However, if we have our own backup, we can

go back and retrieve those backups. And how long is how long is that backup good for?

That I can't answer. Have to get back to you specifically on that. I've talked to my system administrator on that.

Because I think that determines the value of this bolt on is if it's not much longer than forty five days, then you're really not getting much for your money.

We can take a look at that if you'd like us to, sure.

Thank you.

Does anyone else have any other questions, comments? Alright. Thank you, Director Popp.

Thank you.

Moving on to then item number twenty -thirteen 30 eight, the recruitment status report. Director Rachman?

Sure. I'll just mention again bus driver. I think August into September I talked a little about driver and where we're at and numbers were looking good. We did lose a few drivers, one in particular who just said not interested in driving such a big bus because it is different. We saw the applicant pool kind of dip, and now we're seeing it go right back up.

And I think some of that is probably time in the year as well as general manager Mcdonald has been on TV. He's been on the radio. And that tends to bring that spike up a bit. So one thing we are looking at doing, we have not decided officially to move in this direction, but is bringing back a referral bonus citywide for employees. Obviously, HR would be excluded from that, but also a sign on bonus. And so we'll explore that. Any money that we would spend on those bonuses would come from vacant salary dollars. So we wouldn't be asking for additional funds. But we'll see if that might bring that back up when it comes to the numbers of drivers applying. Other than that, I'm happy to answer questions that you have.

Thank you. Anyone have any questions? Aldo Burson Hayden.

Thank you, Chair. I know in my environment when I'm looking to hire people right now, it seems like we have our pick of the crop. And it seems like I'm getting a lot more applications than I was three months ago. Are you seeing the same behavior from the city's perspective, or are we still seeing a lull in getting the right candidates to apply for the right jobs?

Yeah. So if you go to I don't know if it's in your packet, but certainly it's in the budget book. There's a graph that shows the number of applicants per position that has spiked back up considerably. So during COVID, it went way down. And then it kind of went up and down but did not recover. A lot of our positions, the response is strong. So if we put it out there for two weeks I have a couple in mind right now that I'm thinking of like 60 candidates just like that, very qualified. We still have a few of those positions that tend to be difficult to recruit for if they're very specialized. And obviously bus driver is one of them. But we are seeing an increase.

Excellent. Anybody else? All right. There being none, I will entertain a motion to adjourn.

Move to approve. Second.

Yep. Move to adjourn. And a second. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye.