Economic Development Committee - Regular Meeting

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Mine's red. Good afternoon. I'd like to call to order this meeting of the Economic Development and Innovation Committee. Tuesday, September 15th, 2026. Clerk, will you please call the roll?

Meldon?

Here.

McPherson? Here. Driscoll? Hobbs? Jones? Comines? Martinez?

Present.

Morris?

Here.

Sarantu? For present.

Okay. As we get into this committee hearing, economic development and innovation, if everyone remembers kind of a new constitution of this committee and its focus areas. I'm excited to be having this conversation. I was just asking Mackenzie, my legislative aide, when we as a council passed the resolution to move forward on a responsible AI framework, plan, And it was in January. And so here we are. Still feels like summer. And so I'm going to take it as such. I mean, fall is what, next week? So yeah, still in summer to review kind of where we are and what is happening. I made the comment perhaps last week that I don't know that anything really maybe proves how needed this conversation is. other than thinking about how much has changed in that time period. You think about how much the conversation around AI has changed even since January. And so it just struck me that in a few short months, different things pop up in the society's core focus area. We can get so enamored with things. This work, hopefully, is going to help us guide our city, our employees, our departments, and our partnerships, those that we work with, in a meaningful way. So I want to kick it over to Director, what is your title, please?

Chief Information Officer.

Chief Information Officer Bennett. I know you have an update in general, the IT, and that'll be exciting to hear, and then we'll get into some of the AI work. My colleague already has her light on. That's how excited we are to be here. Councilwoman Morris, how can I help you?

Well, you know what was really interesting is I was listening to the BBC last week and one of the quotes that really struck me was saying that they were saying that AI has the ability to end civilization within the next 10 years. And, you know, part of me was thinking, okay, hyperbole, you know, what are we talking about? And so I actually put it on my social media, and I started talking to other people where I could. And, you know, it's just a really evolving, interesting topic. And so I'm really thankful for... chair meldon for bringing this forward and for you all to work on this because this is really important it's important for us it's important for humanity apparently so there's a lot of things that we need with guard rails with this technology some some feel that as long as we have a capable president we'll be fine but capable is the key word sorry And so I'm excited to hear what you have to present. But I wanted to preface this because it really does have a lot of ramifications, even in my other profession. We're talking a lot about how this could replace workers. The question is, how reliable is it, and so forth. So thank you so much for coming and talking to us today. Thank you, Chair.

Thank you. It's certainly in the news, and I can tell you that in our conversations, I have the utmost confidence that Chief Bennett here is going to be able to really guide us through some of these nuances and some of the different things that come up. So without any more comment from me, I'll kick it over to you. Go through the full presentation, and then I'll keep track of questions, and we'll go through them in order. Great.

Thank you very much. Good afternoon, members of council. I'm Ann Bennett, Chief Information Officer. And I'm here with my teammates, Lauren Scholes, who's back behind us, Steve Iwinski, Josh Rosso, and Lucas Santus. And we're pleased to share an update on our recent IT activity. I always like to start with our strategic priorities. And they are the same that you've heard, but they're important because they not only guide our spending, but our work effort on a daily basis. The first is improve and expand service to our customers. That's both our internal customers, our employees, and our residents. Manage risk, and you know we talk about that a lot in terms of security and reliability. Invest in applications that drive operational efficiency and bring value to our residents. And support data-driven decisions through the development of data models, reporting, and analytics. And I will turn it over to start our project updates to Lauren.

I heard this mic is very loud, so I'm going to try not to stand too close. My name is Lauren Scholes. I work in our IT department. I am a project manager. While you guys were together, I wanted to take the opportunity to update you guys on the Dayforce implementation project. So we started implementing the project last fall. We're still actively implementing and we're doing a lot of testing of the software right now. A lot of internal teams are working every week, every day to get into that software and test that we're configuring it correctly. So at the start of the new year, we're gonna launch three of the Dayforce modules that you can see on the slide. The first one is gonna be core HR. So that'll give employees access to their basic demographic and work information. Things such as your contact information, your emergency contact information, your job title, your rate of pay, some basic information about you and your job. The other module that we're gonna launch is recruiting and onboarding. If you're familiar with NeoGov, Dayforce is gonna replace NeoGov, so we're gonna do our recruiting and onboarding through there. So anything that you currently do in NeoGov, if you're doing job recs, if you're hiring, if you're onboarding somebody new, all of that's gonna happen in Dayforce. Reporting will also become available as part of this phase one at the beginning of the year. And the reporting will be driven by the data that's kind of in the system as part of phase one. So it'll be around that core information and that recruiting and onboarding information. So then in March of 2027, this is probably the part you guys are most excited about, we are gonna launch three more modules. So the first one will be time and attendance. Time and attendance I will say has been a big challenge We don't currently have an enterprise timekeeping system across the city, as you guys know. Every department is doing things differently. Some people are keeping track of their employees' times on spreadsheets, some are doing it on pieces of paper, some are using clocks, some aren't. It just kind of runs the gamut. We have to kind of take in all of those approaches that people are using today and kind of try to make them fit into this one system. The good news is we have a team that's really dedicated to looking at how we're operating today in our timekeeping area and we're making sure that we can put it into the Dayforce software and make it work. Dayforce will bring a lot of automation in that space and a lot of guardrails, so we'll be able to ensure that we're following union contracts, TMC, all the rules that are out there. The software is going to help us follow those rules a little bit better. And then later this year, we plan to pull in all of our payroll clerks and do some real-time testing with them. So they're gonna have a lot of work on their hands, but they're gonna be entering pay into SAP and into Dayforce at the same time, and we're gonna validate that everybody's getting paid the same. The other module that's going live is payroll. We're making really good progress there. As a reminder, Dayforce is going to replace the SAP payroll. SAP doesn't go away for anything else, so SAP stays, just the payroll portion. And I think what people are most excited about and you guys are most excited about is that your pay stubs will become electronic. And you will also have access to update all your direct deposit information yourself. So if one week you decide you want $50 going into a savings account and the next week you don't, good, change it. And then the last module that we're going to launch is learning management. This one will likely launch slightly after time and pay, just so we don't overwhelm our employees and so that our internal IT team and HR team and payroll teams, they can support the go live of pay and time in case there's any go live questions or concerns. So we'll launch learning shortly after that. The intent of learning is really to store the employee's training, certifications, licenses, all in one place and to track their status, whether they're active and when they expire. We don't look to replace the learning management stuff that fire and police might do or an electrician might. They've all got specialized training. They're going to continue to do that training where they do that training. But in the day four system, we will be able to track all the training they've had and when certificates expire or licenses expire. So that's my high-level overview update of day four. I'm just happy to take questions at the end of the presentation if you guys have anything. Thank you.

good afternoon my name is stevie vinsky i'm an i.t project manager as well just wanted to provide an update on an upgrade that we're doing to the city works environment we are currently in the process of upgrading city works to version 23 which is the last on-premise upgrade before we begin preparing to eventually move to the mandated cloud-based application. This version offers an enhanced user experience as well as addresses several key performance issues. Most notably and prominent for a lot of our users is going to be improved asset tracking in the storeroom module. enhanced reporting and data querying, and streamlined contractor license management. As far as where we are at today, we have successfully upgraded our test environment, and we're actively meeting with departments citywide to begin user acceptance testing. We're targeting a late fourth quarter upgrade date, hopefully in November or December of this year. And after the upgrade itself is completed, we will be working with all affected departments to begin transitioning them to the new interface within the upgraded version, which is called City Works Respond. This will be replacing the City Works office companion that most city users are accustomed to using today. So we felt that upgrading to this version rather than going directly to the cloud would allow us ample time to work with each department to ensure a smooth transition rather than forcing the change as part of the upgrade. And I will be happy to answer any questions at the end of the presentation as well.

Good afternoon. I'm Lucas Santus, the End User Support Manager. I wanted to take a moment to offer some insights into help desk operations, sharing just a few key metrics that we have over the period of June to the beginning of this month. We received over 2,400 tickets across two types, either a problem that was presented or a service request. I have a chart here showing our average resolution times for the different priorities that we assign each request when they come in. I also have a chart below that that shows our satisfaction scores. These scores are collected after a ticket or service request has been resolved, and the maximum score we can receive is a 4 out of 4. I also want to specify that these metrics are for my team and user support. We plan on sharing more metrics focused on other groups within the IT department in a further update. And I'm happy to answer any questions at the end of our presentation.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, I'm Josh Rosso, the last project manager for the IT department, and I just wanted to give you an update regarding our UCAS project, which is the phone system upgrade, and speak on the realized savings through our optimization efforts. As you're aware, the city's current telephone system needs to be optimized and modernized, so we posted an RFP seeking proposals from hosted telephony providers for a cloud solution to replace our current telephone system. With the approval of council, we enlisted the help of the Boz group to develop those UCAS requirements, review the RFP, and assist with the response analysis and selection. We are finalizing the proposal review, and once a vendor has been selected, the new solution will be implemented using a phased approach. Here we can see the savings through network and mobile device optimizations, as well as license optimization and alternatives. The 2023 service optimization generated $82,000 in annual savings by creating an inventory of all monthly recurring telecom expense. The 2025 to 2026 future readiness initiative avoided $145,000 annual cost increase through our PRI to SIP modernization work. Boz also found $167,000 in savings from unneeded lines after department level review. Since January of 2025, the wireless optimization work has yielded nearly $320,000 today in savings. Monthly spends with our wireless providers have gone down from about $57,000 a month to $26,000 a month. Finally, our department is also committed to optimize our software licenses by keeping an eye on unused licenses, reducing entitlement, and investigating lower cost alternatives. Happy to take any questions at the end of the presentation.

Okay, now for the part I think we're all here for this afternoon. As it was mentioned earlier, you'll remember that council approved a resolution declaring the intent of the city to develop a responsible artificial intelligence strategy. And we're pleased that the support of council and the alignment with our planned work has gone smoothly to date. We've made some good progress. The strategy for our framework includes an AI policy, an IT security policy, an AI use case template, AI project portfolio, data privacy policy, and a data governance policy, as well as a workforce readiness plan. As you'll see, we still have some items that we need to tackle that we will hopefully be able to report back to you with significant updates in the near future. For this update, we wanted to highlight the actual policy itself. The policy is complete and will become an official city administrative policy. Our intent is to establish a governance structure that allows us to leverage the efficiencies gained with AI while protecting our employees and residents. This policy includes responsible AI principles to ensure human-centered, secured, transparent, equitable, and accountable use, an AI use case review that will assess value and risk with IT, the mayor's office, and the law department, AI agent controls to make sure there is prior written approval required and approved agents are inventoried and monitored. A list of prohibited uses, including examples such as social scoring and automated decisions without human review. Life cycle governance, making sure that related public records, procurement, and incident response plans are followed accordingly. With that, we are happy to answer any questions you might have on any part of the presentation.

Thank you so much. Are you controlling the slides over here? Can you go back, too, maybe? Chief Bennett, did you have something you wanted to say?

Yes, and my sincere apologies. I totally forgot. We need to distribute the policy to the council members. Oh. The actual policy.

Yeah, that'd be great.

And that is, sorry. And also, we have a narrative around our strategy if you just want some joyful readings.

Always. While we're doing that, and before we jump into the AI framework, can I ask one question about, go back a couple slides, this last one. Does it, yeah, there you go. Department level review found $167,000 from unneeded lines.

Yeah, I don't know if you remember, but when we came to you, and thank you for your support of this, to leverage an external resource to help us with this, we're calling it network optimization, but really, we were just combing through a lot of undocumented circuits. And the rates for those circuits continued to go up. They weren't serving, in many cases, they weren't needed. But I'll tell you, I understand now why no one tackled this work before and why you need a professional. And I want to shout out, of course, to my teammates that did the hard work, the boss group who supported that work, and our internal customers who were super patient with us when we disconnected services that they did need. Because things weren't documented, we had to take some risk. And boy did we, you know, we had a plan, we had a recovery plan. but there are many occasions where we disconnected something that needed to be in service. But now it's documented, and it wasn't a huge disruption, but it definitely was a disruption. But that is why it's happening. You know, people didn't tackle this in the past. There's alarm circuits. There's all this scary stuff, you know, that nobody wants to just take that risk. But we did, and it realized some real savings.

Yeah, I would say so. I mean, that number stood out for a reason. So thank you.

And that cell phone savings is a big deal, too. We have a lot of people who have cell phones because their boss told them they need one, but they don't use them. And we're automatically, if it goes, first we started like 90 days no use, and now... Like, you better call us if you're going on a long vacation because we're going to disconnect that thing. And we can always turn up service really quickly. We certainly don't want to disrupt operations. But it's expensive. And we're going to have to come to you to replace our phone system. And that's going to be a significant expense. And I... We'll certainly call upon the support of many and get a lot of feedback before we make any final decision, but we've got to get serious about do you really need a desk phone? Do ya? I mean, could you use a soft phone on your PC and your mobile phone? Should we buy two super expensive devices for every employee? Like, no. So we just, to be continued, but that one's gonna be a little spicy too, just like those erroneous disconnects. But we're gonna proceed with it.

The thing I'd love to hear about that is that as technology changes and evolves, the way we approach it, meaning bills and how we even think about accounts should change as well. So yeah, it's interesting stuff. I'm going to go in order because the lights all came on at once. So forgive me if I messed it up. Councilwoman Morris.

I don't think I was in order, but I will just be very brief. As one of those that was cut off.

Oh, no.

That's okay. My apologies. That's okay. It's okay. But we got it fixed. So I just wanted to say thank you and, you know, shout out at the rooftop. I still need my service. So thank you so much. And thank you for your patience.

If you would have called me back, you would have kept your phone on. I'm kidding. Councilwoman Kramer.

yeah thank you and thank you for all of this and for all of your work um my question was about the phones and um it sounds like you are working on it so i'm not going to belabor the point but to me it just seems like it seems wasteful to have a phone that the city pays for here and then also one on my desk that i don't use So I thought, let's get rid of those phones. I know everyone doesn't probably feel the way I do. So I wondered, what is being done about that? Is there an audit on maybe the desk phones too?

Today, we don't incur any additional expense because that was an asset that was purchased. The new environment, however, is subscription-based. So it will matter if we have one sitting on someone's desk. We would have to buy a new device, first of all, so that's just the outlay of that hardware. But then there will be a subscription associated with that number, so we want to be certain that it's in use. So we will be monitoring it very, very carefully, because you'll have to have a license or entitlement. So again, to Councilman Melvin's point, it's a much different billing model. So you having, you know, right now you having that desk phone isn't, we're not incurring, we're not paying maintenance on that desk phone or anything like that.

Okay, okay. Moving forward, is there going to be any kind of, like,

reaching out to people hey do you need yeah so we'll we'll reach out by department and um we already did to start to put together our budget um i didn't like the results of that research so we want to go back to department heads and you know what we are under you know A MUCH DIFFERENT BUDGETING CIRCUMSTANCE AND FINANCIAL CIRCUMSTANCE AND WE WANT TO, I MEAN, WE'VE GOT TO ACT RESPONSIBLY. AND SO PERHAPS SOMEONE DOESN'T WANT A SOFT PHONE, I'M SORRY, YOU MIGHT HAVE TO HAVE A SOFT PHONE AND WE MIGHT HAVE TO TRAIN YOU ON HOW TO USE IT. BUT AGAIN, WE WILL CONSULT CAREFULLY WITH EACH OF THE DEPARTMENT HEADS AND THE DIVISION HEADS AND THE SECTION HEADS, THERE WILL BE A LOT OF CONVERSATION. but there are gonna be some kind of new criteria for whether or not you have a phone. Okay.

Thank you. I appreciate all you guys have done on this policy and thanks for answering my questions. Thank you.

Councilman Martinez.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. To my colleague's point, you can take my desk phone. You can have it. I don't use it. But I guess I was going to go more towards the policy, the document here. So first time seeing it, I appreciate you doing it. Can you kind of walk me through it, kind of what the methodology was? Sure, sure.

Yep.

And then also kind of what are the- If I'm in an elevator and I have to explain this to a resident, how do I explain it?

So the intent of our overall AI framework, and it's not just the policy, that's one component, but it's really to allow for the city to take advantage of some new technology in a responsible way. And as we approach any technology, it's things like making certain that we have a good business case, making certain that we have you know managing the risk associated with that technology and we've all been made aware you know we're keenly aware of the national or international conversation about ai right now the one thing we can control is how we use ai at the city and we want to do it responsibly so we put together this framework to allow us to do that And if you think about where our big areas of our concern with the policy are, the policy doesn't so much address AI use like we all might be using it today for more personal productivity. Where we start to get concerned about is agentic AI, where there are independent agents making decisions, taking action. I like to think of AI, and a colleague made a great analogy for me, and I've used it over and over again, but There's AI as a thinker, and I think we all, we can't help but use that today, right? You Google anything, you get an AI response, you see co-pilot, you use chat GPT. That's AI as a thinker, and it's providing you with information so that you can take action. And we of course want our employees to use that responsibly, make certain that they understand the reference that the AI used and that it's a reliable source. not that that's not concerning and doesn't need some guidance, but not as concerning as the use of an agent that actually takes action, or what I call a doer. So the thinker, yeah, we're all getting pretty comfortable with that, and the doer. And I think a lot of the conversation that you hear today is more about the inappropriate use of the doer. And I think Councilman Meldon made a great point just in the short time since the resolution, how much has changed? And I think we might be entering a time, and with technology, we talk about a hype cycle. You know, it's really, really big. And then we dip down into perhaps what you might call a trough of disillusionment, where, wait a minute, is this exactly what I wanted? Is this... where we want, the direction we want to head. I think you've heard some national figures speak out about that. Do we take a pause? We want to be in a position here locally again to have a framework that always causes us to take a pause and stop and think about what we're investing in, not just from a business case perspective. Does it make sense? You know, does it Does it drive operational efficiency? Does it truly bring value to our residents? We want to assess that. But we also, again, part of our strategy, we want to manage the risk. And in the AI space, it's not so much different about any other action we would take. It's just sort of the power of it and the transformational nature of it. We've got to be even more diligent. I hope I've answered your question, but really, I didn't. Sort of, kind of. Sort of?

It's kind of nibbled around the edges, right? And I think what I was kind of alluding to, and I think what the community conversation, the national conversations, is what you outlined here, and that's kind of what I wanted you to highlight, is the prohibited uses, right?

Yep, yep.

because these are the same conversations we're having on not just flock, but other systems throughout our community and throughout the country. And I think it's important to highlight these, So that's one. And then the second part, so this is an administrative policy. Then I guess the other question is oversight in terms of does council have a role, I guess, for enforcement or if there's an exemption or a, well, We say prohibited, but we made the business case to do this. Who has the ultimate say? Because according to this, it's the administration. Does council play a role in terms of that oversight? Sure. So I guess that's what I was kind of asking.

Yeah, well you certainly play a role in that you you allocate budget or you don't, right? You approve or give us the authority to spend. So as we invest, and you make a really good point, when we talk about or came to you with the day force proposal and asked for your approval to spend on a new human capital management system, I bet a question for you now, and if you don't ask it, we'll answer it anyways, is how does that system leverage AI? And how do you plan to leverage AI? And how do you plan, if we don't want to use it, to control it and make certain that it isn't enabled in that software? Those are all the kinds of questions that you're going to ask us. And if you don't ask us, we're going to tell you anyways. Because now we have a framework again. And that will come in the form of the AI project portfolio. So there's all these little sections in it that we have to answer before we make an investment or approve the enablement of that functionality and software.

So then can you highlight quickly the prohibitions that you've outlined in your...

The big one, unauthorized AI agents. So it's got to go through the process, if you will. The next one is real-time and covert biometric identification. So that is, again, transparency is highlighted. Covert means you don't know, right? So that, I think, is an important one. Classification of human facial or body movements into certain emotions or sentiments with the use of computer vision techniques or emotion analysis. That's a lot. Something we don't do today, something we've said we don't want to do. Now, you'll see, and I don't remember exactly what section, but there's a section, it's called exceptions. So if someone came to us and they had a business case that did that, we would obviously have to take that, certainly before the mayor's office, before the law department. I think from a transparency perspective, we would have to take that, we would share that.

So that was kind of the one that caught my attention. And the only reason I was thinking about this particular one is because in the judiciary side of the house, if they are screening for candidates for the jury, this may be something that the attorneys would want to use to help get a more friendly jury pool or something. So we're saying even to the courts that, since they're under our purview, that you can't use this type of information on your side of the house, so to speak. Correct?

I'm not familiar specifically with the court's use case, so I don't.

Sure, but theoretically. High level, potentially.

Theoretically, high level, potentially, yes. Okay, thank you.

Continue, please.

Did you have another question, Councilman?

I wanted to go through the rest. Of the prohibited uses.

I'm sorry? Of the prohibited uses.

I think we left off at cognitive behavioral manipulation of people or specific vulnerable groups. autonomous weapons or use of force systems that can initiate or direct physical force without direct real-time human authorization. That concludes the list. And there's lots of details around some of those.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you. Before I get to Councilman Sorrento, I have a question about these. from a procurement standpoint, how will this interact with all of the many, many, I mean, I don't even know how many RFPs we might have out in a given year. How will this interact with that? How will it be like a checkpoint?

Yeah, so we have a process today, and we've, I don't know, we've been doing it for a couple years, but we have a security assessment that we do for all new technology, and... Thank you to council. You've approved spending on a chief information security officer that is virtual, a fractional service, if you will. So his name's Paul Ash. So we have our vendors fill out the security policy that now includes a section on AI use. So we can identify where AI is used. As part, and we're going to now introduce it into the RF, we actually were with the procurement team today and talked about making changes to the process so that we have the vendors fill that out very early on in their proposals. It's a required document that they would have to submit, so we catch it at the front and then don't later have to say to one of our teammates, you can't buy that, they didn't pass the security screen.

Thank you. Councilman Sorrento. Thank you, Mr. Chair. First of all, I just want to say thank you for you and the department scaling back our expenditures. That's very important as we greet a new budget soon. Very important we reduce expenses. Secondly, as always, I'm very concerned about security. And with the advent of more AI, I think we really have to be vigilant. And I see that security is uppermost in your mind too from these documents. So I'm hoping that we can continue our vigilance and make sure that important confidential information is not breached. and that we are serving the citizens in a responsible way as well as ourselves. So I just wanted to bring that up. Security is critical.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilman. Can we go to the next slide after this one, I think? No? One more before that. Thank you. Perfect. So similar to... I'm curious about a timeline and then also kind of what, even though some of these are... Let me think about how to ask this question. Some of these are in progress, researching, some are complete. Help me understand two things. One, what action from council, because when I hear policy, we have one, you know, there could be an internal policy that you just pass kind of departmentally that does not require a council. Thank goodness. And then there are policies that we pass. And so help me understand what you mean by policy and then what the timeline and interactivity with council should be. This is the beginning of kind of unveiling a lot of this. So I'm curious, what are those next stages?

I would, so there's kind of two, all the, I think we shared, there's two things that are really works in progress. And we're really very much in the research stage. The one is our data governance policy. Well, one is our, I'm sorry, three, our privacy policy. And law department is working on that. And they have a draft ready that they are going to start to, circulate internally, but we'll want to present that to you and share that with you with the help of law department, of course, because that not only applies to the data associated with our use of AI, but just in general. You know, how the treatment of data very closely aligns with our data governance policy. The privacy policy really works hand in hand with that. And data governance is really about the treatment of data. Who owns the data, who's like the data steward it's called, but who's responsible for the care and feeding and quality of that data. People talk a lot about data being AI ready. And data cleansing exercises. And a lot of people talk about AI cleaning up the data. So we want to make certain that we understand the quality of our data. And again, the care and feeding and who's updating it. Used to be that data governance was an enterprise project. So IT and... Some other people got together and decided, you know, we're going to classify this data that way and we own it and we're going to tell you when you can use it. And that really never works. So it is somewhat of a decentralized activity, if you will, but we want to put a model in place so that all the departments and all the data owners and stewards can follow a consistent model so that we can trust the quality of the data and the security of that data. The other one that still needs work is our workforce readiness plan. And I'll tell you, that's for me, personally, the most important component of our framework. Our, you know, job, You can tell I've been at this for a long time. This to me is the most transformational technology in my entire very long career. And it is the most impactful on us as individuals in our everyday life and as employees. And we want to make certain that our employees are ready to adjust to the changes to their individual jobs. And there's no question that people's jobs will change. Some people's jobs will be automated, will be replaced. That is, I think, and I've shared this a million times, but there's a quote, Ginni Rometty, who's an old IBM CEO, that ai won't replace individuals it'll replace the individuals that don't use ai i don't know if i have a quote exactly but we want our employees ready to be good consumers of ai and be ready to use it but we also there's some new jobs associated with ai you know our policy calls for monitoring agents We want human in the loop, right? You've heard that expression. Somebody's got to be trained to be an AI monitor. We want that to be one of our current employees. We want them. And so I've been doing a lot of research and reaching out to some local organizations, some national and regional players. Most recently, Investigating Jobs Ohio has an AI certificate program. The university's launching an AI institute. I'd love for city of toledo employees to be a first you know part of that first cohort uh... because not only again we want them to prepare for their jobs to change but we want to prepare them for the new jobs and what we might call a new economy we want them to be ready and i think that we can serve you know we employ a lot of people we can serve as a leader in the community and how we approach this from a workforce perspective uh... don't have it figured out but i'm very enthusiastic about it and um... I have a lot of teammates who are willing to help, so I think we'll get there.

I want to interject and attest to the fact that workforce readiness being the lowest on this list is not reflective of your priorities. That's more of a, quite frankly, what's the most kind of quick update in terms of completion and then so on. Because every time we've talked about it, you've brought this up. We've had a lot of conversations about, and when you say, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I do want to make a clarification I think you'll agree with. when you say, you know, the bottom line is some jobs will be, they'll be kind of irrelevant, you know? It doesn't mean the employee is irrelevant.

Right, right.

The actual position, which by the way, has been true since the tractor. Exactly. Like this is not about, you know, some robot coming to, you know.

And sometimes it might be a simple conversation with an employee about interest and need somewhere else in the city. Maybe I've always wanted to get my... CDL or whatever that certificate is. That's what I've always wanted to do. Well, we need that. And it's just not this. Every time we introduce technology and become more efficient, it impacts people's work. And so we want to just make sure that people have a lot of heads up and training so that they can prepare for either a change in their role or a new role.

I want to make another comment on that, which is, in our conversations, we've talked a lot about the opportunity. I think if you were to ask, I would bet one whole dollar that if you were to ask every director in this building, do you have all of the people on your team that you need to get done everything you want to get done, that no one would say yes. Everyone would say, I need more people, I need more people. So this notion of workforce readiness to help reskill, upskill, kind of adapt and evolve to meet new needs, it really is an opportunity for what you said is the beginning of your department's strategic goals, improve and expand services to our customers. How do we do that? By getting more efficient with the workforce we have by doing new things. It's just such an incredible opportunity. I have a comment that's going to lead into a question about what data is and how we should think about it as a public entity. I've been thinking a lot about data because I'm really, really intrigued by governance and privacy and what you think about that and what you think that might turn into. I'm not asking you to look into a crystal ball. I was thinking about how a public entity interacted with the residents 50 years ago. And I was thinking, like, we have all of these amazing books, and it's, like, people's names, and there's logs, and it's pen on paper, and it's so-and-so walked in to pay their $45 in property taxes for the last 40 years or whatever. And we wrote that down. Sam paid taxes. And we interpreted that as information. We have information about this taxpayer because it was written down in a book somewhere. Now I think we've like distanced ourselves from what it actually is when we call it data and And I'm not saying we shouldn't call it data. I'm not trying to take that word out of our vocabulary. But it just strikes me that in the public sector, data is just information about our people, whether that's employees or citizens, about our responsibility to them, what we did or did not do for them, what they did or did not do that they should have done. And so that gets, at scale, lumped into these kind of things these computers and we call it data and it kind of distances ourselves from the human element of it i'm curious if you agree with that frame and then how you think about data privacy and governance in a public sector sure um well first of all we've got a lot of data we have structured data we have unstructured data and if you think about it just think about all the meter data like you know like

We're collecting reads every minute. So there's a lot of data.

I'm not trying to interrupt you. Meter data where?

What do you mean? Oh, I meant water meter data.

Yeah, but water meter goes where?

Where does the water go?

Water meter from what? A person's house? A person's business? So I'm just saying I want to like, yeah, that is data. And it's like, did Sam pay the water bill or not?

Yes, yes, I was thinking more just reads. My point there is just there's a lot of data. And it's not all classified.

For everyone here, that was a glimpse into every conversation Ann and I have. That was two seconds ago.

But there's just lots of different, and we want to start to categorize that data. make certain that it has the appropriate treatment. And the good news is we've got a lot of regulatory stuff that we can align with. So there's CGIS data. We know how to treat CGIS data, right? And we know how to treat HIPAA data. We have all of that here, but there's a lot of other categories of data that we don't have that clear definition around the treatment, and that's what we want to work on our data governance and privacy policies to put that structure around all types of data, which means you've got to categorize it all, again, assign an owner to it, a steward that manages the care and feeding. There's a lot to it. That's why it's going to take a little time. It's got an inventory at all.

Question you love is when I ask, when do you think we might see that? When do you think we might see that?

I think the data governance, probably a good six months from finalizing that. Okay. But it will come in, you know what, too? It won't be, and all of this stuff's changing so quickly. And I think the quality of it is more around how often we open it up and update it. and make it fit our current needs. This policy should change. Our data governance policy should change. Our IT security policies should change because it's a bit of a moving target, right? We're evolving.

And then privacy will be sooner than that?

Yeah, that one I think quite soon. We had somebody great working on it, and she's made great progress, so it's really a matter of the time it takes for everybody to review it and understand it and agree to it.

Wonderful. A couple questions here. I'm going to get to these lights. This is just a request, I suppose. Can you work with law, or maybe we can have some combination of the council floor and 22 to talk about how we should think about policies that are more internal operations and then policies that we want to kind of codify. I'm curious about that. I do not think I'm even close to an expert at how we should go forward with that. But I think some of this is so transformational that I know that I would want to err on the side of a legislative act, especially if something's like in procurement, if it's an internal policy, I feel like it can just be I don't know, I'm just very curious about all of that and how we should approach it. Future conversation, Councilwoman Morris.

thank you chair um and thank you for um presenting this um just a just an observation on the actual piece of document the the policy at the end um you have you know the chief the cio the the law director and then you have deputy mayor are you also going to put the mayor on there as a signatory hi don't believe that's how i mean this is the form of administrative policy so i would have to follow up with you and ask how we typically handle it i don't know okay all right and you know as a member of city council you know we are the purse um but you know it and that's a frustration in and of itself because I feel like people want us there for the money, but they don't want us there to help make the decisions. That's part of the code. You can talk about the charter, you can talk about the 180, I don't know what the code 30, code 30. But I think it's important that, and you touched on this, and it needs to be an evolving document. This is not going to be static. This is something that's going to continue to evolve. But I think it's important for, I don't know if it's Sam's committee or if it's Councilwoman McPherson's committee that will be reviewing this. Because I think that this needs to be reviewed now. depending upon how quickly this happens um you know it may be i don't know if it's monthly i don't know if it's six months you know i don't know the answer to that but i think it's important for council to also be at the table and have some discussions, even if we can't set administrative policy. So I want to go on the record with that. But I do want to say that one of my favorite commercials is the Chase Bank commercial. I don't know if anybody's seen it. But the guy goes and he gets into a car and there's no one there driving it. And then he goes to get coffee and he wants black coffee with no cream or sugar. And they put cream and sugar in the coffee. And so he doesn't feel heard. And so one of the things that I think it's important to do, regardless of whatever computer technology, if it's AI or what have you, is the human interaction, especially with government. So I just want to put that out there, that we don't want to do, to be so, and this is a larger issue, but we don't want to lose that human interaction. uh... so whatever we do with our policies i just wanna mention that and uh... i like the fact that you had talked about uh... training uh... our local talent because we do need to have somebody in house you know it's one of the frustrations of council is that we always you know contract with someone outside of our area and whereas if we can train our own workforce to do this i think it's it's it's just golden and then lastly one of the concerns that i have is you know um you know public and private and so forth and requests that we have for public records documents and in the past i mean our clerk has had uh has we have a vault and we have information going back to the beginning of time and so i worry about how she may be involved as a steward um of she keep she has kept not she personally because she's not that old but she has you know her office has kept documents over time. And so how, how is the clerk involved in, in this, this data housed information? And I don't know, Julie, you may want to say something, you may not want to say something, but it is a concern that I have as a member of council on how we deal with that issue.

Yeah, and you bring forth such a great point because we're talking about data which generally refers to a digitized asset. But we have a lot of assets that are not digital and wouldn't necessarily be covered by these policies. And what is the appropriate treatment? I don't have an answer, but I certainly appreciate the question and I think it's one we need to ponder.

Yeah. I don't know, Julia, you probably don't need another meeting, but I would think that this would be important for us as the record keeper of the city over time. You know, what do we keep? What don't we keep? You know, what's public? What isn't public? I think it's important for you to be a part of this. So I'm just putting that out there. Thank you.

Thank you, clerk. Thank you. It could be interesting, and again, I'm not in contract law by any stretch, but I just wonder if we just define data as both digital and analog, how often would that be relevant? to a vendor to go look through a file. But if they wanted to, it would also be included in what we're... Yeah.

I mean, that's kind of been contemplated that there are information assets and there are digital assets. So I think what you're referring to are some physical information assets that generally I think would be covered by our records retention policies. which differ from, again, digital assets. But they can't be forgotten because oftentimes our physical information assets are digitized. So the treatment of that is important. And there is, well, I'm just going to.

This is funny. We are doing great. We're covering a lot of ground. We're closing down at 5 o'clock. We have Councilman Martinez. That was a bit of a hint, not too much of a hint. Please, sir.

Thank you. Could you go back to the next slide? I'll try to make it.

That one.

Yep. So I was just going to say the workforce readiness plan. Awesome. That would have been super helpful this past year and a half when we were doing the AMI project and trying to make sure we couldn't find local talent so we didn't have to outsource in the water department. So I know that was a long debate and frustration with this council. And then I guess my bigger kind of question is in terms of the data privacy policy along with the governance policy in terms of how we interact with so we're at the local level how do we interact with the county state and federal level in terms of requests and safeguards there and that i think is another privacy question that continues to come up in in conversations in our community so if you can just opine on that briefly and then i will yield the floor

I'm sorry, I don't have a good informed opinion on that. I think you're just bringing a great point, and I don't think there's a definitive answer there, and that's kind of what we have to work through together.

Gotcha. Well, that was bearing to the point. All right, thank you. And I yield the floor.

Hey, well, I love an honest answer. I think I will think about timing for the next meeting. We're going to go to Councilwoman McPherson here in a second, but I do think another conversation to pick up on where this has been, and maybe we can continue to dig into those good questions. Councilwoman McPherson.

Thank you. Thank you all for all of this. This is way above my pay grade. I'm just AI burnt out right now. But I want to go back to the employee portal and what we're doing with that, with the change. Thank you. With the onboarding and the core, because we spent a lot of money to get this program. And I want to make sure that we use it and that our employees are taught how to use it because this is going to save a lot of trees because we won't be doing checks in the envelope you won't be getting your stubs anymore and all of this but to spend that kind of money and not use it effectively or our employees not knowing how to use it to me is is a waste of money

Yeah, and I'll be very honest. I'm super worried about the same thing. But I'll tell you, we've been worried about it for a long time, and we did something about it. And thanks to council again, you approved a significant investment in change management resources. And the two things that they really are charged with is one, readying our employees for the change so they understand why their job is changing and what the new job is, if you will. And two is just managing the training and all the communication around the project. Oh, Lauren, you creeped up here. Thank you. You answered. Thank you.

You answered it perfectly. I was probably going to get more into the weeds than Ann just did. We do work with a partner to help us with some change management for our employees. We are putting together lots of training, lots of user guides, lots of instructions, something kind of fun. well, my idea of fun maybe, that we've done is we've launched a SharePoint site for the first time within the city of Toledo. There's lots of information out there that our employees can get to. Right now that information is pretty high level, not telling them exactly how they're going to use the system, but what the system's going to do. So we're sharing that information right now. As we get closer to launch dates, we're going to have in-person trainings, we're going to have online trainings, we're going to have reference material that we can hand out, the whole gamut. We're going to do a lot.

So we will be hitting each department and kind of specializing with each department and the onboarding as we bring on new employees, having that because one of our weaknesses was onboarding of new employees because they come in and they get little bit and then they're thrown out there and that was a big frustration well you know so I just want to make sure that council doesn't approve things and I I know how well it can be but if it's not utilized and if it's not put out right you know the young people they'll be on it like this you know being able to check their pay stubs and And the timing, the check-in, your hours, that's all going to be there. It's going to be totally different for a lot of our departments that are used to writing it in or putting it on the tablet. So I just want to make sure that, and I know you're good, Ann. I appreciate all the work that you do. I just want to make sure that our employees are equipped and trained and as excited as We are about the turn of the century that we're going into the city of Toledo. Because I mean, this is big for the city of Toledo.

Yeah, and I can tell you we've actually gone out, we've done what we call road shows with every department. And it's basically, hey, employees, this is what's coming. Again, not at the level of detail of here's how you're going to use it, but more of here's what to expect and when to expect it. And people are excited. People, like our employees are excited. There's a few employees that are a little worried about technology, but you know what, like, we can teach you that and we can help you there. We are going to kind of put a subject matter expert in every department related to timekeeping and payroll, and they will know how to use the software inside out. So when they have those employees that are like, I don't know what to do, we've got an expert in their department that can help them. And then we'll also have our help desk available to submit tickets. We are there to help you as well. IT is there to help you.

So thank you, I appreciate it, and I just want to make sure that's, you know, my, it's good to have new technology, but when everybody doesn't know how to use it, it's of no good, you know, and if only a few people know how to use it. Final comment. Thank you for your updates and your alerts that you send out to us with spam and those funny people are sending out emails and connecting us to people that we don't know. I really appreciate that because sometimes you see something from the mayor and you just automatically open it up and it ain't the mayor. So I appreciate you guys being on top of the cyber people or whatever and then um just thank you for the work that you do to keep us safe um with technology and protecting us and making sure that the city is protected because I know there are many nights that you go home and you probably don't sleep wondering, is there a cyber monster out there trying to attack our systems right now? So I really do earnestly, and I appreciate you and all the work. And you can have my office phone. I don't know how to use it, no way.

Thank you. I really wish you would have sent me those gift cards that I asked for in that email, so it's fine. Maybe next time. I don't want to make any assumptions when I look out into the crowd. Does anyone want to, do we have any members of the public that would like to offer a comment? Please, come up to the microphone.

let me hear your name i wondered if there was a little rockets shirt hello my name is destiny perkins and i just had a few questions about what was spoken about today like with the data but with our set like is this sold to other people or is it just private when you say certain stuff is private and public With the training of the local talent, like with those certs, with the jobs shifting, is that stuff that the city will pay for them to have? With the time clocks, will that stuff be GPS tracked when it gets updated?

For the, but into the mic so it's all recorded. Yes.

So a lot of good questions. I want to make sure I don't miss any. And I'll probably call my teammates to help. The first one you asked about, or the last one is about the time entry. And I think you asked are we going to geoposition so that we know when somebody clocks in from their phone, are they really where they're supposed to be? And we are not going to be doing that. That's not working as well as designed. So we may employ that feature later. But we'll know. I mean, we'll know if you're not at work. So I don't anticipate that being a big need or a problem. Another one, you asked about data privacy and the sale of information. I am not aware of any conditions under which the city sells what we consider to be our asset, the data. We do have provisions in our software agreements, the software license agreements, that specify that we maintain ownership of the data so the vendor's not able to sell the data because it's sitting in their instance of an application. You had so many good questions. Can you help me with?

When you spoke about jobs shifting and you spoke about...

Certainly, yes. So our approach to employee development, it's absolutely two ways. It's not just all on the city. It's not just all on the employee. And we are very limited on budget. So we are working with some external resources. And I think I may have mentioned Jobs Ohio, the University of Toledo. There are some AI... programs that we would like to leverage and we're hoping will be low cost. And so depending on an individual's job and the impact AI may have on their job or their interests in career development, I would say that there certainly will be circumstances where the city will pay for that training. Ideally, we would gain some of that knowledge internally, and once we send a cohort through, then perhaps we could have internal training. That would be my hope, but we'll just have to see, because I don't know what we don't know yet.

Yes, ma'am. Thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate your interest. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Anyone else from the public? I would make a last comment then as we finish. Like I said, we'll have a, we'll get notice out of the next committee hearing. I'd love to work with you on that. Kind of keep these rolling on an appropriate cadence. Certainly don't want to waste anybody's time. Thank you so much for you and all of your teammates. That's the words you used. And I can tell that you view each other that way. And that's a compliment to you and a compliment to you as a leader. I want to just say I've been looking forward to this for some time because I think it's so critically important And I am of the opinion that if we, if you were to kind of give me a time machine and we had all of this done two years ago, three years ago, I think we would have went through the last several months of this flock conversation very differently. That is my opinion. And we will see if that's true because I've given this example time and time and time again, but I remember when we had our most recent conversation about promise pay, And you think about what promise pay does in our operation it works with like The quite frankly the most vulnerable residents in our community and it's a it's a it's a third-party vendor that we're using and I just wanted to look into the company and And on the homepage of their website, they said something about AI. Interestingly enough, it's not on there anymore. They're still, I'm sure, using AI. But it made me think, how are we certain that the information that that third-party vendor has access to is as safe and secure as we want it to be? And what gives me great encouragement is that I think what we just went through and what we're working on here is the answer to that question. And that's why we're going after it. And that's why I'm so thankful that this group is here kind of leading the charge on it. So thank you for this conversation. Look forward to the next one. Meeting adjourned.