Metropolitan Council - Regular Meeting

the Metro Clerk. Same process, we will hear the presentation from our Clerk. Once that presentation is completed, I will open it up to Vice Chair Spain for any questions that he has, and then I will open it up to the body, prioritizing members of the Budget and Finance Committee. And with that, Mr. Clerk, if you could introduce yourself and you have the floor.

I'm Austin Kyle, I'm the Metropolitan Clerk. Thank you, Chair Toombs and to the Budget and Finance Committee for the opportunity to present the budget here today. I'll start by giving just a brief overview of the Metro Clerk's Office and the various functions and the programs that we administer, focusing on what we've done so far in FY26 and then wrapping up with a look at FY27. The Office of the Metropolitan Clerk is charged with the recording and safekeeping of minutes, resolutions, and ordinances of the Metropolitan Council and all other documents relating to the official actions of the Metropolitan Government. Our office has two divisions. The first is our main office here, the Metropolitan Clerk's Office. located just right outside these chambers. Our second division is the Metro Records Center located at the Metro Southeast facility. We currently have a total of six full-time employees, including myself, one part-time employee, and we have one vacant position currently. As most of you know, one of our primary functions is supporting the Metro Council by processing legislation, preparing agendas, staffing council meetings, tracking the council actions and preparing the meeting minutes. So far in FY26, 483 ordinances and 673 resolutions have been filed in our office. Each piece of legislation is tracked in our Legistar system and we track the legislative history and keep items updated as it passes through the council process. 22 council meetings have been held so far in FY26 with another three scheduled in June for a total of 25 meetings. And that correlates to 25 agendas being prepared and 25 meeting minutes being recorded in our office. We've also coordinated with the mayor's office, the vice mayor and members of council to facilitate the consideration of 185 board and commission appointees and nominees. For FY27, we're gonna continue working with our RITS partners and our vendor to make updates and enhancements to our legislative systems with the goal of better efficiency for my office and better user experience for the council members and members of the public. We are particularly focusing on enhancements to accessibility of documents, not only to meet ADA standards that are being enhanced in 2027, but also to expand language access for all of our residents. The Metro Clerk's Office provides administrative support to the Board of Ethical Conduct by facilitating the complaint process outlined in the Metro Code, preparing agendas, supplemental materials, and minutes for the board. The board oversees the standard of conduct complaints that are filed against Metro government elected officials or members of Metro boards and commissions. The board also monitors the compliance of lobbyists with annual reporting requirements. Or FY26, the Metro clerk's office has received six complaints that required the board to convene with three of those complaints requiring a separate meeting for a hearing to be held for a total of 10 board meetings. The clerk's office also provides administrative support to the charter revision commission. This commission meets whenever there is a council resolution proposing amendments to the charter, or when there is a citizen led petition filed proposing to amend the charter. In FY 26, we've received one petition proposal to amend the charter, but it's needed to be revised and refiled a few times. So we have ended up meeting four times this fiscal year to consider that proposal. The Metro clerk's office facilitates the lobbyist registration and reporting processes pursuant to section 2.196 of the Metro code. For calendar year 2026, we have 80 registered lobbyists representing a total of 140 clients. There've been a total of 284 registrations filed, which equates to $28,400 in revenue received in the current fiscal year for this program. In addition to the initial registration, lobbyists are required to file a report by January 31st of each year regarding their lobbying activities and expenses. This year we received 92 lobbyist reports for the 2025 reporting year, which is a 100% compliance rate. This is the first year since we've been tracking this that we've received 100% compliance. And I believe that can be attributed to the updates to the lobbying code made by this council within the last year or two. The Metro Clerk's Office also facilitates the annual disclosure and benefit reporting process that's required for Metro elected officials, department directors, assistant directors, the mayor and council office staff, and just a number of specifically named positions in Mayor O'Connell's Executive Order 22. Each year we receive submissions from around 500 employees and with the two separate forms, the disclosure form and the benefit form that comes close to about a thousand records that we record each year for this process. Up to this point, it's been a very manual and time consuming task that comes around in January of each year, but funding that was approved in the current fiscal year, we are in the process of implementing a new ethics administration software platform specifically for this reporting with the goal of making submissions easier for filers, as well as easier on my office for tracking and managing this program. We're currently in the midst of the implementation, working with our vendor weekly on getting this program up and running, and it will be in place for the January, 2027 filing for the 2026 reporting year. The Metro Clerk's Office is also the designated public records coordinator for a majority of Metro departments. We facilitate the public records process for a total of 37 departments, while some of the other larger departments maintain their own processes due to the high volume of requests they receive. In FY27 so far, we've received and coordinated approximately 1,950 public records requests, averaging about 163 each month. The clerk's office had since 2018 utilized Hub Nashville to receive and respond to these requests. We were able to make that work for us working with Hub Nashville, but it's not actually set up to be a public records management system. Last year with the assistance from ITS, we found that we could implement the Granicus public records platform called GovQA for pretty much the same price we were paying for the Hub Nashville licenses. With the new system, we have unlimited user licenses and there is much more public record specific functionality that works better for our office. Part of our FY27 budget modification request is for the annual license costs for the GUF QA software. That does require a little bit of clarification. Our... Our previous Hub Nashville licenses were included in our budget under the ITS and internal service fees category, whereas the Granicus contract is paid from our software license category. So there will be an associated reduction in internal service fees with the increase in the software license, but should balance out. As mentioned, in addition to our office here at the courthouse, we have the Metro Record Center division consisting of two full-time employees located at Metro Southeast. The Record Center is a warehouse facility that's a little over 36,000 square feet with a shelving capacity to hold around 54,000 containers. We currently have 48,000 containers stored with us. The Record Center is a temporary storage location for departments to store their inactive records until the legal retention is met and we facilitate the secure destruction of the records once that retention is met. A portion of our budget modification requests for FY27 is for an upgrade to the records management inventory tracking software that we use. The current version of the software is nearing the end of support from the vendor and it will require us to transition to their new version. We also administer the commercial solicitation program. Currently 37 active permanent companies are registered with 115 individual solicitors issued this fiscal year. There are 8,181 addresses registered and tracked on our do not knock list. We only have the one budget modification included in the Mayor's proposed budget, and it's to cover the various software licenses that I mentioned. We've changed our public records platform, the Hub Nashville to GovQA. As I mentioned, that will shift funding from the internal service fees to the software license account in our budget. The GovQA license is about $56,000, and there will be a comparable reduction to that internal service fee. The $17,000 for the Granicus legislative system is to cover the annual increase in the cost for that contract. And FY26, our portion of the Granicus contract was around 106,000 and this year it's estimated to be about 123,000. That will cover the Legistar agenda and minutes management software, the voting system we use here in the council chamber, as well as the Legistar website for all the legislation agendas and minutes to be posted publicly. Finally, the budget modification includes an additional $15,200 for our record center software. As mentioned previously, our current version of the software is being phased out and we're upgrading to the new version. Our FY27 budget also includes a $25,200 reduction representing the one and a half percent across the board that all departments are facing. And our FY26 budget was $1,764,500. FY27 will be $1,657,500, overall a 6% decrease. That includes the 1.5% across the board reduction, as well as a non-recurring allocation that is not re-upped for FY27. And with that, I'm happy to answer any questions. Vice Chair Spang.

Thank you, Madam Chair, Mr. Clerk. After that presentation, my only question is what do you do with all your downtime? I mean, really, I'd never really wrap my head around all of the different functions that your office carries out with a pretty limited staff. Do you feel that you have sufficient staff to effectively carry out all of those functions?

We are stretched a little thin right now with our current vacancy. Right now, it's getting spring and summer weather, so our commercial solicitation program is getting stretched very thin with the amount of complaints we're receiving as well as vendors wanting to wanting to go out and solicit. So once we get that position filled, I think we'll be a little bit better.

Thank you for that. And your 1.5% reduction is about $25,000. Will the temporary vacancy in that position allow you to cover that, or will that require further reductions?

Yeah, I believe that will definitely cover us at the start of the fiscal year. We probably won't fill it immediately on July 1. We'll start that process in July. Yeah, our vacancy should help cover that at least for the next fiscal year. Okay, thank you.

Council Member Allen. I will just say very quickly that that 17,000 for the voting software is worth every penny. If anybody remembers the old days of paper voting, we've come a long way and I really appreciate how efficiently you run every time we have to vote.

Thank you.

Council Member Ellis.

Austin, I just wanted to say you're the quietest person typically in the room during a council meeting. So I'm really thrilled. And it was worth the two gallons of gas just to come down here and listen to you present the information that you all's office does. So be sure and tell the other folks there that we really appreciate them. Thank you very much, Council Member.

Council Member Porterfield. Thank you, Madam Chair. The council lady from District 29 kind of read my mind. I literally wrote, we see you, but we don't hear you. So it was pretty cool to actually hear you. Yeah, like he actually speaks. So thank you for that thorough presentation. My only question was, if there are no additional, if we don't supplement your budget in any way, if we keep it at what the mayor has given you, does that cover everything you need? Or obviously everyone could do more if they got more. but are you good with the mayor's budget or do you need something else?

I think we are good with the mayor's budget. We typically do run under budget every fiscal year, so I think we can make it work even with the reduction. Thanks.

My questions have been asked already. I can pile on the praise. You all are doing an excellent job, Mr. Clerk. I learned some new things today. I didn't realize the extent of the work that you do. And it is a lot of work for a small staff. So thank you. Last call for questions? Seeing none. Thank you, Mr. Clerk. That concludes our department hearing for the Metro Clerk's Office.

Thank you very much.

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