Budget Committee - Regular Meeting

🎵 🎵 Thank you. you Thank you. Thank you. ¶¶

Good morning, everyone. I'm calling our Finance and Budget Committee to order. Roll call, please. Chair Johnson.

Vice Chair Yang. Here. Council Member Bowie. Council Member Coleman.

Here.

Council Member Kim. Here. Council Member Yost.

It's Jost here.

Jost. Council Member Naker. Here. Five present, one excused being Councilmember Johnson, one expected shortly being Councilmember Bowie.

Thank you, Roshanna. Again, I'm Vice Chair Nelsi. I'll be chairing today's meeting. Before we dive right into our... presentation here, I do want to recognize Roshana, our intern from the Ward 7 office. And I know your internship will be wrapping up pretty soon here. You're going back to college. And so thank you so much for doing roll call and assisting with today's budget committee. Can we all give Roshana a huge round of applause? Thank you. And first on our agenda here is a presentation from our Department of Safety and Inspection. So I'd like to welcome up Director Iyazhong. I see many of our DSI staff and other department staff and guests in the room here today. So thank you all for joining us. I will hand things off to you.

Good morning, Vice Chair Yang, council members. I'm Ia Xiong, the director of the Department of Safety and Inspections. And I'm pleased to be here to present the mayor's office proposal for 2027 for DSI. This is the agenda that we'll be going through. And before I go into it, I want to thank the DSI team for helping and the OFS department for supporting us. Our mission at DSI is to promote safety and wellness where we live and work, prevent life and property loss, support neighborhood vitality, and promote equitable, innovative, and sustainable solutions that work for all. DSI provides a variety of services, and we're guided by complex rules and regulations, and it can be complicated, but our budget is pretty straightforward. For 2027, our budget proposal focuses on Continuing the utilization of non-general funds, specifically the opioid settlement fund and the recycling and solid waste fund, which we'll go into later also. And then maintaining our current revenue sources and the strategic utilization of vacancies. For our 2026 budget recap, earlier this year, $380,000 of the Housing and Redevelopment Authority funds was moved over to support the tenant protections work. And I'll provide more information on that program in a little bit. That funding was to go towards materials and supplies and staffing. If you were to add up the numbers that's shown here, it does not add up to 380 because the staffing, as seen here, was adjusted for the 2027. And so the staff, it doesn't add up to the 380. We also have $100,000 that we are putting towards solid waste and recycling fund. And this is for the trash collection, recycling, things that would fit into this type of service. The Opioid Settlement Fund is used for HART for the five FTEs and for the remaining expenses. That amounted to $621,910 for that fund. So recent initiatives that we have, POLI is a citywide implementation. For DSI, it replaced the legacy software programs. It was implemented last year. What we've seen so far, I just put some highlights here, was we're seeing about 99% of permits being submitted online versus pre-poly was 55%. We also saw 2.84 million in online payments processed in the first year. And earlier this year, we migrated 4 million records from the old system onto the new. There's still ongoing validation, and we still have records that we still need to input. And that will have an impact on our financing, as we'll discuss later.

The funding for this... Director Zhang, I'm going to pause you. I'll take a question from Councilmember Kim.

Just a quick one, and it doesn't need to be answered in this moment. But I'm wondering around the ways that you, because so much of what Poly is being automated, what are the ways that you're working with other departments to compare notes and upload notes from other departments to the Poly system? I've come across a few things just recently where notes from maybe SPPD or from other departments would be useful. in the consideration of this automated approvals. So don't have to answer it today, but just wondering if part of the implementation is uploading information from other departments and how they can contribute to maybe documentation for license conditions and things like that. So do not have to answer it now, but for respectfully submitting to you, Director.

So Vice Chair Yang, Councilmember, I will touch on that later in one of the slides. Great. The funding for the project is shown here from ARPA funds. And we do have a project management contract that ends at the end of this year for that service to help us with the Poly implementation. This is not a general fund. We don't do a lot of capital projects within DSI, but wanted to highlight this. The budgeting comes from capital maintenance, approximately 6.8. And what we wanted to show here is our animal services shelter is over 50 years old. To rehab it would have been very costly and not efficient. And so we are repurposing a parks building to include improvements to the services that we provide and to the shelter as shown here in what some of the Things provided at the new shelter is providing proper individual housing, isolation for housing for sick animals, and really just improving the ventilation and air quality. It is expected to be open later this year and being managed by the Office of Financial Services.

Council President Aker. Thanks, Chair. I'm curious, Doctor, what happens with the old building?

Yeah. Vice Chair, Council Member, the old building is owned by the city. I think it will be reassessed or reevaluated with the Office of Financial Services with real estate. I don't know specifically the details of that, and we can let you know.

Thank you.

For tenant protections, as mentioned earlier, $380,000 was a one-time fund from HRA to fund staffing and materials in support for it. Our goal here is to maintain meaningful tenant protections while aligning ongoing staffing with sustainable recurring funding. So far, first it went into effect in May of this year. So from May to July, We've seen about 13 calls. It's still ramping up. Our focus has been on education and assistance and outreach, and that's been our main initiative at this point. For enforcement, the administrative citation will help inform that as we continue to develop that. As the program continues to mature and pick speed up, we'll be reassessing and reevaluating to see what the actual workload is and caseload. And depending on what that looks like, we will look at the budgeting and see what kind of impacts that would have. Expenditures to date from the HRA funds, just as of Q2, this is very high level. Materials and supplies are about 11,000, and this was for the billboards. If you walk around the downtown Skyway, you'll see those up there. And then personnel, as mentioned, went into effect in May, and so we have about approximately 60,000 so far. And the expenditures, additional expenditures to the end of this year is about 100,000 in personnel and 10,000 in materials and supplies. So approximately a little less than 200,000 will be spent towards this program. And there is still materials and supplies. This includes translation of things and updating our website. As long as we're still on tenant protection, in this next slide, just talking about what the proposed changes in regards to positions go, outlining this so that it makes sense. In 2026, two positions was adopted, and then mid-year of this year, earlier this year, the HRA changes increased it by an additional three. So what the proposed changes for 2027 is to reduce it by two, which means the remaining in 2027, as shown on the last column, is three positions in the tenant program. So if you look at the adopted 2026 to the proposed 2027, it's an increase of one position. So three minus two is one. And that shows up in this next slide here. So you see here on the third line there, that's where that one additional FTE shows up. So for our proposed changes for 2027 on that first line, current service level adjustment, that spending piece is the citywide adjustments for inflationary increases. And then the financing piece is to reflect the historical financing that we've seen in construction services. So it's not anything new.

It's really just reflecting historical trend.

That goes along with the summary abatement on that second line. I'll have more to reflect on the next slide. But the spending here and the financing here is also not introducing anything new. It's reflecting what the historical trend has been and making those adjustments to reflect it moving forward.

Director, I have a couple of questions for you about tenant protections. The positions in this table here, like whether it's 2026 or 2027, the focus of those staff, it's solely tenant protections work. Is that right? Or are they delegated other buckets of work not related to tenant protections too?

Council Member or Vice Chair Yang, that's correct. Tenant protections and rent stabilization.

Okay. And can you talk about the impacts of what that staff reduction would mean for next year then?

Yep. So in this slide here, what we have seen so far is really a slow ramp up of the program, if any at all really at this point. It's more about the outreach and the education piece of it. What the positions that we are seeing we're proposing to reduce can be, one of them is a customer service rep. which can, if we should see any ramp up of services needed, we can utilize other customer service reps, and so there can be that spread around. I think that really, at this point in time, we are really, we don't know what that would look like in regards to the volume of it, and if there is an increase in volume, we'd reassess and reevaluate at that time.

Okay, thank you. Council Member Bowie.

Thank you, Chair Yang, and I thank you so much, Director John Starr, for coming a little late. We had some visitors earlier, but this was... really anticipated conversation. I have two questions related to the FTE changes. The first one on the vein of the tenant protections. Can you speak for the positions that's going to be added for next year? How do you see where that fits in the organizational chart of DSI? And since you mentioned it's more so educational and outreach-based, if you can also speak to what additional FTEs to supervise. Is it a manager? Is it a deputy director? Just because as someone who has a lot of questions related to tenant protections, it's always helpful to know where that person who will be the front-facing position and who actually manages that position.

So vice chair, council member Bowie, what you see here is the positions, the management assistant four, the management assistant three, and then the customer service representative and the proposed positions that are to be reduced. This does not result in any positions with layoffs. It's utilizing a position that will soon to be vacant. And so the management assistant will still provide that higher level oversight and supervision of that program. So the services is not gonna be impacted in that way.

And I just have two quick follow-ups related to that. Can you share how many management assistants the DSI already has?

Council Member Yang and Council Member Bui, I don't know off the top of my head. I believe these are the only ones. But we can provide that correction or update.

And my last question, at least for this time, for the customer service representative, since I've been a council member, I would say when it comes to customer service, that has always like it's always been like the top up. I have seen really positive response, swift response, and I can really see a benefit for maintaining the customer service representative position, but if you can speak to how the department plans to absorb that that role and how do we keep continuity around just making sure that we have a good responsiveness to some of our constituents.

Uh-huh. Vice Chair Yang, Council Member Bowie, the customer service representative off the top of my head, I don't recall the number of staffing that we have in that, but there's more than just these two here. And so it has traditionally been like positions that can be crossed over with the other customer service reps. And so that's where that support is, is that if right now there's very low volume that we're seeing, and if there is more volume that's coming up in the coming year, that's when we would need to make those adjustments. But there are other CSRs that can support this. Thank you. Thank you. So going back to the 2027 proposed changes, talked about the tenant protection. The other positions that are proposed is the conversion of an accountant four to an accountant three. there's an opportunity to reevaluate that position to a different repurposing that position due to a retirement. And then reducing the customer service representative that we just talked about. This is a halftime position that has been very difficult to fill, very high turnover rate because of that. And so that position is also proposed to be removed. And then we have a DSI Inspector 1 in code enforcement that we are proposing. It's currently filled by a retired person right now and expected to be vacant.

Council Member Coleman.

Thank you, Vice Chair. Thank you, Director. Could you say a little bit more about what impact you would anticipate from having one fewer DSI Inspector 1 in code enforcement? How, I guess, like, curious how many inspectors that will leave us with, sort of what current workloads look like. This just is something that comes up, obviously, a lot with residents. And so I'm curious about, yeah, how we think that the resident experience might be impacted by that change.

Yep. Vice Chair Yang, Council Member Coleman, off the top of my head, I don't have the numbers of how many inspectors we have. and we can get you that information. What I do know that with our poly implementation, our response time have improved in regards to that flow of intake of complaints and responding to it. We can provide more information in regards to that. The position that we're proposing here, it's a temporary position that has been kind of flowing in and out. And so that's why we proposed to reduce it.

Just a quick follow-up. Yeah, it would be great to see both information on current staffing in that role, and then also the decrease in response times, now that we have Polly up and running. I think all that information would be very helpful. Thank you.

So going back to the summary abatement and explaining the spending and the financing piece of it, just historically looking at the ground maintenance piece of it, you can see here in the adapted budget has been very low, but the actuals have been a lot more. And so just reflecting it in the proposed 2027, kind of right-sizing it to reflect historical trends. Same thing with the financial piece of it, where the budget, adapted budget, has been lower than the actuals. So that's the purpose of making the changes for the proposed 2027. For budget to actual financing, as you see here, we have had historically a positive delta. For last year, with the impact of the cyber attack and the implementation of Polly, it has impacted our ability to invoice. And it has impeded that piece of it with the migration of the records coming over. We expect to recover $1.8 million from 2025. that has carried over into our ability to collect in 2026. We're currently working with OFS to determine and find resources to get those records in and to validate and get going with the invoicing and the cash receipt of it. I think along with that, also looking around like the communication piece of it and making sure that when we do have that ability, it is not a surprise to folks. Spending piece of this, for our city general fund, covered it in previous slide, that $3 million includes the adjustments of inflationary increases, the reductions of the staffing that we talked about, and the increase of one of the staffing for tenant protection. We don't have any proposed budget for city grants. And then for the general government special projects funding, they're looking to remove the one-time carryover from 25 and 26. So removing that, but then keeping the HART positions in that fund, which shows up here for 690. 215 remains steady. And then for charitable gambling, we offloaded that a few years ago in regards to the enforcement piece of it. So there is none proposed for this year. Talked about the recycling and organized trash of the one-time recycle.

Council President Meeker.

Thanks, Vice Chair. I have a couple of questions on this side, Director. So one of them is with regard to the City General Fund increase from 27 to 26. It's striking to me that there have been really modest increases recently. from 24 to 25, and 25 to 26, and now 26 to 27 shows a significant increase. I know that a million sum of that is just reflecting the summary abatements better, and that's not actually new spending. But it seems like even taking that million out, we're still talking about at least another million. And I know on slide nine, It looks like it's $1.9 million for current service level adjustments, new spending from the general fund. So can you say a bit more about why is there so much new spending out of the general fund this year?

Vice Chair Yang and Council Member Naker, I'd like to phone a friend of OFS to help explain that.

Sure. Vice Chair, Council Member, the biggest change you can see here is in that current service level adjustment. DSI has 165 employees, so the bulk of that is just contractual increases and health care increases for those employees. We can get details on what all makes up that. amount just under $2 million there, but that's the bulk of it.

Yeah, I'd really like to understand that better because I assume they've had roughly the same number of employees for the last three years, and yet the general fund really barely moved in that time. So it just seems like an outlier, and I'd like to better understand that.

Yeah, I do know there was some changes related to the market study for positions that were in DSI specifically. So it might be a larger bump this year, but not expected to be continuing to grow at this rate. But we'll confirm.

OK, thank you. And then my second question relates, Vice Chair, to the government special project. the decrease of the one-time funding that you're talking about, is that ARPA funding that's coming out of there? And what's there is opioid settlement dollars. What's the decrease in one-time funding?

Vice Chair Yang and Council Member Naker, that is a one-time thing, and I will defer to OFS.

Vice Chair, Council Member, I believe that The removal of that carry forward is opioid specific. So there was a couple years where spending was slow for the heart team in particular because we had other sources that we were tapping for that work. There was, I know, either 2024 or 2025, there was a grant that it looked like we weren't going to be able to use on time. And so we shifted heart costs over there, which freed up that opioid money. So it carried forward. And then this year, we're just not carrying it forward anymore. to reflect the spend down that's happening in 2026.

OK. And we've gotten separate information about the opioid settlement funding in general, I think, in our inboxes. So you can look that up. OK. My last question, Vice Chair. The charitable gambling line, we used to receive close to $500,000 in charitable gambling. What's happened with charitable gambling?

Vice Chair Yang, Council Member Naker, so there is, for DSI, there's the enforcement piece of it, and so there is, a few years back, as you can see, there was funding for it, which was where DSI was enforcing it. The state is now enforcing it, and so there is no need for us to do so.

Oh, sorry, this is funding, not financing. Okay, got it. Do we also receive any... Is there charitable gambling that happens? I know that they pay into the youth fund, and there's some revenue from charitable gambling. Does that not reflect in DSI's budget?

Vice Chair Yang and Council Member Naker, I believe it does not reflect in ours because that collection is really, it's parks and DSI, there's the enforcement piece and then the eligibility piece and the distribution of it. And so if there's, if I can ask for assistance in that.

Chair, Councilmember, we can look into it. There's no more revenue that's coming into DSI for that, but I can confirm about other departments.

Councilmember Kim?

I had a question around the history of budget to actual financing. I'm wondering around the footnote about $1.8 million that's expected to be recovered from 2025. Can you tell us what that's from? And I'll probably have a follow-up question.

Vice Chair Yang, Council Member, the implementation of Polly and the cyber attack limited the ability to invoice and so the four million records that was transferred over and we still have some records that needs to be inputted, that's where the gap is in our ability to do the invoicing and cash receiving. So there's a lot of records that haven't been and that's where we are looking for OFS and partnering with them to find the right resources to do that so that we can get caught up.

Okay. What kinds of invoicing? Was it certain kinds? Was it invoices across the board? Where do we have outstanding invoices?

Yeah. Vice Chair Yang, Councilmember, we can get you a full list of what that all includes, but there's business licensing, I'm going off the top of my memory now, but there's a lot of records that needs to be inputted, and each of those records have an estimated amount of financing slotted to it, so we may have where the record, there might be a lot of record, but their revenue collection is very small, or smaller than some where there's a lot of records Not a lot of records, but the revenue generating that is higher. So we can get you that information. I don't recall off the top of my head how everything that was in there.

Okay. And then I've got a question around then what happens to the – so if it was like from 2025 and now we are in 2026 and we're setting 2027's budget, what happens to those dollars, right? Like presumably – we walked into this year with that sort of gap for those invoices, right, that we just accounted for last year. So I don't want to call it new revenue, but like what happens to the invoices that we are now getting dollars for and where does that $1.8 million go?

So Vice Chair Yang, Council Member, I will defer to Office of Financial Services to – that's an accounting question –

Yeah, Vice Chair Yang, Council Member Kim, my understanding is that depending on the timing, it gets accrued back to 2025. So then given that we're closing 2025 and that's done, no more spending happening in 2025, it will just fall to the city's fund balance. So it will support that, but does not get sort of reprogrammed or added into the 2026 budget.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Council Member Kim, for that question. I was wondering the same thing, too. So I appreciate you asking that. Just a follow up on that last question there. So I was wondering, is it an option to have it be revenue that is used for next year at all? Or is the only option for us to put it into the fund balance?

Vice Chair Yang, so it will get accrued back to 2025, and so it'll go into the fund balance. My understanding is that we recognized an estimate, and knowing that this was going to come in, and now that we have a firmer number, I believe our accounting team is updating that. The way that we would access that revenue would be a use of fund balance, which we don't typically like to do because it's important for us to keep a healthy fund balance. And I know it was a really big lift given the financial challenges we had in 2025 to come in even close to balanced there. So that's what it would look like. It would look like a use of fund balance. But I'm not sure, without checking with our accounting team, how much over what we had estimated this number actually is. So it may be that it's very close and there's not really excess revenue there that we could recognize.

Thank you.

So for the FTE summary, as mentioned before, the proposed changes results in a reduction of 0.5. So you can see here the history of the positions. And five of those positions were put into the opioid settlement. And that's what we're proposing to carry forward in 2027. And then for the city general fund, that's the reduction of the positions mentioned before. And I will go into the unfilled positions, which will talk more about the vacancies and the positions that will be removed. So for the unfilled positions, if you had looked through here, you'll see that there's two proposed cuts listed here that is unfilled. That's the customer service rep at the halftime there. That one is proposed to be removed. And then later down below, the third lineup is one of the inspector one is also proposed to be removed. The other position that is also not shown on here is still filled. That's why this is unfilled position, so it doesn't show up here. But as far as these positions, we are in progress of reposting. We're posting it in different negotiations and getting it filled. Unless you want me to go line by line? Up to you.

Okay. Okay.

For the ARPA funds, we also included Fund 211 here. You'll see that all our projects are completed or were completed in various years. We don't have any active project per se when it comes to budget. And you'll see the dollar amounts also shown on here. The Fund 211 was used for the top two bullet projects there. So I wanted to recognize that other ARPA-funded projects benefit us from DSI in our work and wanted to include those projects on this here.

Council Member Coleman.

Thank you. Could we just go back quickly to the unfilled positions? I'm curious about the DSI Fire Safety Inspector 2 rule, where it's specifically called out that there's frequent turnover. I was wondering if you could share more about why we see that turnover and if there are changes that might be being considered to prevent turnover and thus budget implications.

Yep. Vice Chair Yang, Council Member, the high turnover rate is Comparing it to what the market is and our benefits that we have, we don't have vehicles for these positions. They use their own personal vehicles. That's one thing. And just the pay also is not comparable to what they can also achieve elsewhere. And so there's that turnover rate. The retention that we do have is based on The teams that we, our teammates working together, their value in working for the city of St. Paul, the benefits that we have here. So there is retainage there, but there is turnover due to some of the other benefits that we don't have.

Is that the pay disparities, is that as compared with other jurisdictions, the same position in other jurisdictions?

Yeah, so I'm not sure specifically what that difference is, but I do know that there are often times when we have made offers and it was through negotiations we were not able to match what they were expecting. So...

Director Joy, I just have a quick follow-up on that. I know you mentioned, well, you mentioned a bit about negotiations already. I know there's a whole process that goes behind that. Earlier, you talked about a study that was done, too, which it sounds sort of like it was a wage study, very important to do. I know there's a lot of positions that we want to be able to do that for. And I'm glad to see, or glad to hear, you've been able to pinpoint what the challenges in filling these positions are. I'm just wondering, is it... Is it in our interest to keep going down this route where we leave things as is? I question that because these are very important positions, too. And to be very transparent, I get a lot of mixed reviews, I'd say, from folks who do business, who even come to the city for permitting. and just work with DSI, like our inspectors overall. Some of them had really great experiences, some of them not very great experiences, and they talked even a bit about how they feel like they've been treated very inequitably, and also experienced racism too. And so, just again, these are things that I'm receiving in terms of emails and communication from folks who have interacted with DSI before. And so I'm wondering, is this the route we want to continue going or are there significant changes we want to make so that we can get to a place where we are very competitive and we can keep filling these really important positions for the city?

Right. Vice Chair Yang, I can appreciate that. So some of the things that I have seen so far, and I think there's opportunities to make improvements for our staff and for our customers. One thing, as I mentioned with the vehicles, I mean, obviously that's budget-related, and looking to see how we can partner with other departments in regards to maybe some vehicles that we can use transfer over to us. In fact, we're working with Fire Department right now in one of their vehicles that may come over to us. So looking at different things like that to help our teammates do a better job. And then as far as customers go with mixed reviews, I have also received mixed reviews. I have heard very great kudos to our teammates in the response that they have. With the poly world and technology, I think we're very focused on implementing that. And one of the things is not everybody is technology savvy. They want to actually speak to a person. And so what we're gonna do later this year is do surveys on what our customer needs are and get that feedback on how we can improve our services. So that's one of the examples.

Thank you. I'm just thinking back to what you had mentioned about customer service. And I know customer service is a very high, our residents have high expectations when it comes to customer service. And I personally do too. I even remember the audit committee at one point when I sat on it, we had a whole study about customer service. feedback and how the city can improve in it. And I do want to just again emphasize that I believe these positions are so key to us being able to achieve that high level of customer service for our residents and then also make sure that our buildings are up to code and we can even support businesses and folks who need these inspections done at a quicker and more efficient pace too. And so to me it just like I feel very torn because I understand we're always in a very difficult situation with the budget and how to fill that gap. And at the same time, these are very important investments that we have a huge stake in when it comes to the future of our city. So those are things I'm definitely contemplating about. Thank you.

So revenue trends, changes in outlooks, our revenue continues to grow. And these are some highlights of these upfront investments that we have going on. As valuation goes up, our revenue goes up. Also looking at the cannabis registration revenue is expected to cover the DSI FTE cost of that. And it's expected to stabilize with some business lines still recovering. From the cyber incident, which we just talked about in regards to limiting our access to do the invoicing and the cash receding, and working with OFS on finding the resources to help us in getting those records over and put it in so that we have that ability to do so.

Vice President Aker.

Thanks, Vice Chair. Director, you said this briefly, but I just want to make sure I understand. When you talk about revenue continues to grow, these upfront investments are now moving toward cost recovery. How do they generate revenue? Are you just talking about property valuations generally coming into the general fund, or do these pay specific fees, usage rates to DSI?

Yep. Vice Chair Yang, Council Member, with these development, there's site plan review, there's other permittees as they come on board. Those are where the revenue is seen. And as we continue with these projects, or as these projects continue, we would have more, like... licenses and other things that we, services that we provide that would be, that we would see from these developments. So I think as far as a follow-up, we can certainly put together on what those expectations are from these. But we, and then also like for the garbage, tall grass and snow abatements, those are things where we also are seeing that increasing also as we do more abatements. I think that was it.

All right, thank you. It's the question slide, so I'll take any other questions from council members or comments. Council Member Bui.

Thank you, Chair Yang.

Or excuse me, Vice Chair Yang. I have a question. If you could share a little bit more about the procedures coordinator position. I saw it posted, but I was just curious around if this is like a permanent position or if this is something temporary to... I just want to learn more about the position and some of its goals.

Sure. Vice Chair Yang, Council Member, the procedures coordinator is for our business improvement. So that's with our technology, our poly, all the support that we have for our services. So that is a position that was... There was a job study that was done earlier where the need was for this to be part of that business improvement. And it's a position that is, you know, we're hoping to get that going as quickly as we can to help support the poly and other technology we have.

Thank you.

Any last questions or comments? No, I don't see any. Oh, Councillor Bowie?

I'm sorry. Yeah, go ahead. Well, because I know our time is really limited here. I just want to, I don't see in the changes, and I don't recall during the Mayor's budget address, her speaking about it, Mayor Harris speaking about it, but if you could speak a little bit to the HEART team. I think I heard you mention that it will be budgeted through the opioid settlement funds, but if you could talk a little bit more about the HEART team. And the reason why I'm bringing it up, because, you know, as the mayor took the position of the encampment closures, we can, you know, I would say kind of all agree of how essential the heart team has been and I know they've been really really like a limited scope if there's any intentionality around just maintaining them or you know looking at like other departments I'm just curious to learn a little bit more about what your vision is for the heart team

Yeah, Vice Chair Yang, Council Member, as you said, the Opioid Settlement Funds are funding five positions for the heart. And that includes outreach and code enforcement. And I can't remember the other positions. This team has been intact. They do the outreach. They do the connection of the unsheltered to resources. And so it will be continuing as in previous. I think that citywide, if you look at it between different departments, there's a lot more than just the heart that touches this group of clients. and working with other departments like OFN and some of the CARES and the familiar faces. So there's a bigger program that I think HART is part of, one of them. HART also does the trash collection, some of the services that are provided to the facilities here. And so on a day-to-day, and I don't recall a schedule, but they go out on a regular basis and do that outreach and do that cleanup. So it's always a continuous thing. Thank you.

Well, we are doing great on timing your committees here usually go until 1130 So if folks do have questions, um, you know, you can ask it here If not feel free to reach out to director Zhang as well offline So thank you director Zhang and to all of the TSI staff OFS staff who helped put together this presentation We really appreciate you all I before I adjourn I do want to share we have a special guest here today Caitlin hang is here shadowing me from Johnson senior high school. So Eastside pride and And because of our extra time, Christian, I did want to see, I know, Roshana, you mentioned you're good, you don't have any words to say, but I am wondering if you both would be able, I want to invite you to come to the mic and share any last parting words you have, Roshana, to the council. And then, Caitlin, if you have anything you want to share with the council in terms of what inspired you to come and shadow a council member in local government, that would be great, too. Caitlin, I have here, you served on our HERO City Commission Board for a term, too, so that's really phenomenal. Would you both like to take a minute or two to say something at the mic? Feel free to come on up.

And give us a budget presentation.

Okay.

Hi, I'm Caitlin. I did want to come shadow Vice Chair Yang today, actually, because of Council Member Nacher. I was a part of the right track. program. And she had come and was just on the career panel. And she really inspired me to come and reach out to just the council members and see how it is. And I recently got to meet Mayor Herr. And so it's just very empowering. And I feel like seeing that there is a women board, it's just very empowering to me. And I've always had a love for local government.

Thank you, Caitlyn.

Thank you for your time, and thank you for all the appreciation and the cheering. I was not originally into going into public office or government work, but I had been offered a position as a right track intern before I went to college. And being able to, like, be in this space helped me understand why it's so important that there are, you know, people caring about what's going on. And also, you know, if I had never gotten that opportunity, I would never be here. So it's like seeing, like, you know, you know, right track was mentioned in the budget presentation. So it's like this stuff is important. And I just want to thank everyone who's here and, you know, all of the council members and you guys as well. Just thank you for inspiring me and inspiring all of us. Thank you.

Thank you both so much. You both are inspiring and it is very moving to hear your pathway and starting with Right Track and then look at how you've continued to give back to the city. So I want to personally say thank you and wanted to see if any of my colleagues have comments you want to make to our young folks in the room today and our viewers online.

I just want to echo the vice chair and vice president's thanks. And it was so great that you took me up on the suggestion to reach out and shadow a council member. And I'm so glad that when I said, any council member you reach out to would be happy to have you shadow for a day, that I was right. And you have a great one. So yeah, it is inspiring to us to see you and to feel like people say this all the time, the future's in good hands, yada, yada. You really do feel it, and there's so much to be pessimistic about nowadays, but you give us a lot of hope, so thank you.

Council Member Bowie?

In short, too, as well, thank you, Vice Chair Yang, for just even allowing young people to have a voice, even in this setting here. I just wanted to say I'm inspired by young people every day. I'm now reaching the point in my life where I'm no longer a youth, but aging out of youth, I guess. Transitioning. Youth transitioning. But I just wanted to say... Thank you for taking up the opportunity, because there's a lot of opportunities, as you can see. We have endless opportunities for young people, families, all across different departments. And our Right Track program is just as great as people who actually step up to the plate and actually take advantage of these opportunities and just go out on a limb and just try to learn about your local government. So thank you for being courageous enough to figure it out. And just because of you taking this step, you're going to also have other people coming behind you who are also going to take advantage of these opportunities.

Yeah, big shout out to our former Mayor Carter, also a current mayor, all of our council members who've been here at the table since the inception of the Right Track program. We've all continued to be supporters of the Right Track program overall. And so, again, you truly are the living testimony of the success of the Right Track program we've invested in. So thank you both. And that's the end of our meeting here. So I will adjourn us.