City Council - Regular Meeting

joining us for this week's agenda review joining us online as council member joseph shepherd and the council here may we please start with the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with

Okay, perfect.

There it is. Good morning, mayor and council members. Good to see you on this Friday morning. A quick overview that we had a great 4th of July in town. So nice to see Parks and Recreation fireworks and community out and about. And certainly we saw lots of folks gathering in neighborhoods and celebrating our founding. And as we've talked from the city perspective, really July 4th is kind of a kickoff to the year of 250. So we'll have some other opportunities to celebrate the 250th of America. And then coming up here again on July 21st will be the 156th birthday for the City of Wichita. And that was a meeting Tuesday on the 21st. And we will have cake afterwards of the council meeting. So certainly folks will be invited to enjoy some cake with council. after the meeting on the 21st. I did want to highlight on July 14th, our next council meeting, some issues of note for the agenda. We do have here for council members, and we'll have in your offices, the preliminary information related to the budget. That is the big focus I will do, the city manager's recommended budget proposal on the 14th. Thanks certainly to the finance team and budget team for helping in this endeavor, clearly a team effort across the entire organization, as you all know. The department directors and key officials within each department help to put the information together. So I look forward to presenting their work and making my recommendation. What you have in front of you, for those who are here, is the summary of some of the operational, but the bound version here in front of you is the CIP. And then you will have an even larger document this afternoon, I believe, fully with operational budget information. Interestingly, you consider it a good thing or a bad thing, but this year we should have an $800 million operating budget. So as we think about needs of the city, but also growing revenues, how we want to recommend utilizing those. But last year we had about a $770 million budget all said and done. And things in and out, we should have about an $800 million budget. So that's gonna be reflective in our work going forward on the 14th. Also We're working on a message to employees next Tuesday when I do the presentation to council. I will also part of my Emphasis since being here is making sure we have communication with department directors So they know it's in the final managers budget request, but also making sure employees know What is the recommended budget and then certainly knowing that this is the beginning of the process? And then we're headed towards August 25th with adoption where you all will make the final determination of the budget. Looking at the July 14th, in addition to the budget presentation and recommendation, you'll see we're bringing forward a COPS grant. This is something we haven't applied for in a while. From the city perspective, it is a federal grant that is utilized to hire more police staffing with federal funds. And so, there's been a couple different numbers thrown around, I know. Would we apply for 44 or up to the maximum 50 new police officers? We will be able and looking to bring the full 50 requests, but we'll have police talk that through with the agenda item. There is a local match with that that Increases over the three year. This is a three year grant period and so similar to the safer grant for fire It is staffing that has a local match. And so we'll outline how we propose to use that is that Considered in the proposed budget Yes, no it will scale up, meaning if you're hiring the 50 positions, we can't hire all 50 at once. And so yes, there's some accommodation. It depends on how many we do, but actually this may not take effect until potentially March or April of next year. Yeah, because we have to apply for the grant and then if we receive it and then whatever.

So it's not in this fiscal year. Sorry, Captain Aaron Moses for the record, but Council Member Tuttle and the manager are correct. It's a 36-month funding period. Well, funding is available for 36 months, but it's actually a 60-month period. six-year-old month grant period, which allows us to stagger hiring and allows us, we don't have to have these people hired when the funding is awarded, if it's awarded, if that makes sense. So it's position specific. So when we hire one officer into one of these positions, the funding for that position would be initiated for that 36-month period. which allows some flexibility. The money doesn't have to be in the 2027 budget.

I saw at the end you have to fully fund it for 12 months to those positions.

Correct. The grant requires a fourth year from the local budget. Right.

And so we'll be, as you mentioned, with the safer grant, the same situation of, you know, it's a blessing if we get the funding, but then how do we sustain it afterwards? Yeah.

Exactly. That's the policy discussion we'll have. Yeah. So thank you, Captain Moses. But two-point, Mayor, yeah, that we are able – to initially structural the phase in, and then if we do go forward and get it, how do we look at year four is really the question as we plan ahead on that. Same thing with the Safer Grant. But I want to make sure you know this is a significant policy discussion as we go forward, and making sure we do understand the budget implications of that. Also talking about grants on the July 14th agenda. We do have an application for our continuum of care. We talked about at the last workshop our focus on addressing homelessness and street outreach. We have a grant going in for that as well. And then on the 14th, we do have agenda item for you related to cybersecurity software. We have a presentation today after this meeting with our director of information technology about some cybersecurity approach that we're taking here at the city of Wichita. And then to round out the July 14th agenda, we do have a couple zoning items for you where we are considering duplexes in single family zoning. So there'll be a couple of changes that you're asked to consider. And then we do have some consent agenda items related to paving improvements as we continue our road work. network and road information. I do know that we now have Council Member Glasscock has joined us as well. So he's online. Looking ahead, that's the 14th. I've got some things to highlight from the 21st. Is there anything I can address on the 14th? Policy number nine. Yes, I saw that on there, but I can't see if anyone wants to speak to that. We'll give you some, oh, there we go. Yes, absolutely.

Looks like it's still live.

Yeah. Do you have specific questions? Oh, J.R. Cox, by the way. Just no view? Okay. Yeah. Policy number, refresh this on policy number nine, and then the actual change that we're asking for.

Briefly, the change, there are two changes with policy number nine. One will clarify that as council members, you can call individuals to ask questions. Just makes it very clear that you're able to do that during your consideration. It also is going to change when a case might be heard. If the case was approved by, the zoning case was approved by the Planning Commission and the DAB under the same recommendation and it's not protested at 20% or greater, it will go on consent as opposed to having to be heard.

And this is something I've been championing for a long time, so I'm so glad to see this come to fruition. The time that we spend from staff, this time that the applicant then has to come potentially to the council meeting, if it's been approved by the MAPC and it's been approved by the DAB and the protest doesn't meet the threshold, it just seems incredibly redundant to have it presented at the city council meeting, so.

Yeah, that's all this was.

This is just to increase efficiency and save time for staff and then the applicant agent as well. So thank you. Long time coming.

Seems like a lot of things are. So yeah, this is council generated, so we want to make sure that we brought that forward based upon a recent discussion that you all had with an agenda item. I'm looking ahead to July 21st. We will have the ACFER, which is our financial picture overview, which kind of demonstrates a lot of information related to our financial health, which is strong. So we do that every year on an annual basis, and so we'll do that presentation to you. Also, we're bringing forward on the 21st a couple of Council, again, initiated items. One is related to the purchasing and change order limit. 50,000 to 100,000 and that was something that again was generated from a council discussion during a budget workshop or during a workshop. So I'll be coming forward for your consideration and then also bringing forward the amount of political contributions for city council elections. This is where we have a little discrepancy between the city council rules of how much political donations can be made to a campaign versus what the state campaign finance threshold is, 500 versus 1,000. And so this is to see if you all want to update that to be in sync with the state. And so that, again, was a conversation that's been generated from council members. So we're bringing those forward in two weeks for your consideration and just wanna make sure we highlighted that for your review beforehand or questions beforehand as we work on that information. So.

Do you know who wanted to bring the political contributions forward?

Yes. There actually was a council member who was engaged from the state election commission based upon a donation they thought was in compliance, which it was, with state, but was not in compliance with local.

Okay, cool. Thank you.

Otherwise, we'll take any questions, and then we have a presentation for you today.

City Manager, I'm sorry, I know we've moved on to next week's, but may I ask J.R. a question about the July 14th meeting? Sure, absolutely. Is that okay? Sorry, J.R. Getting your exercise in. For the zoning keys in District 5, I'm just curious, it doesn't say in here, and I know we'll get it presented, but I'm just curious, and somebody had asked me, I know it exceeded the 20% protest. Do you know what the percent was? It said 50 were received. How many were valid, and what was the protest?

Is that item number two? Yes. 24? Yeah. Thank you. So apparently 50 protests were received. Let me see. I didn't see it.

Do you know, Council Member, what the protest rate is? Your zoning case. Item number two. 80%.

There should be a map. There we go.

That's OK. You can just even let me know later. I didn't see it.

This map shows 42%. 42%? Yeah, that's what it shows. OK. 50 seems like a very high number. Yeah.

But they might not have been valid.

Of course, that includes the commercial property across the street.

Well, it does say on the green sheet at the bottom, it says 50 protests were received, which exceeds 20% of the protest area. Therefore, the zone change request can only be approved with supermajority vote, 6 of 7.

And I saw that. I just didn't know what the percent was.

It looks like it's 42.

42.

OK. Thank you.

Thank you. That's higher than the homeowner total.

I have a follow-up question. This has been brought before us a year ago. Can you also provide some previous information? Because if I remember correctly, AT THAT POINT, MAPC HAD APPROVED, NOW THEY'RE DENYING, AND THEN DAB HAD AT THAT POINT DENIED, AND NOW THEY APPROVE. SO CAN YOU GIVE US BACKGROUND ON A YEAR AGO AS WELL? BECAUSE, AGAIN, I KNOW IT'S A DIFFERENT APPLICATION, BUT IT IS THE SAME PROPERTY.

Give me just a moment to see. I don't know that I'll be able to. I think you're absolutely correct. It has kind of reversed, and it's also a different application. I believe previously it was multifamily, if I'm not mistaken. It was multifamily.

It was approved by MAPC.

And now it's duplex development. Now they've denied. duplexes and it'll be individually plotted lots so theoretically the properties would be sold off and i believe previously it was really it'll be just a multi-family large apartment complex i believe is what they were looking for yeah yes ma'am twin hubs yes sir

All right, we will move on to our meeting today with the second part of it. We want to provide you with, for our second part of it, we want to provide you with departmental information. So we have our Chief Information Officer, Director of IT, Mike Mehta, and he will present us some information about cybersecurity and our approach and some tools we're using. So Mr. Mehta, the floor is yours.

So cybersecurity in 15 minutes. It should be fun. I also have a little surprise for everyone after I'm done. I think you'll find interesting. So this slide was meant to be exceptionally busy. Just wanted to give you an idea of how much we touch and kind of what we do. And then I'll give you some numbers after this. Every department, including airport, water utilities. So we do technology for everything, which means we have to secure everything. And I'm sure none of you have had an email about AI in your box today or yesterday or this week. How does AI play into this? It speeds it up. It also creates some issues for us downstream that my little surprise will show you how those can be used. So mainly what I'm going to focus on today is the security in terms of how we protect up front and then what we do to recover. Because the reality today, when you have threat actors that are making $250 million a year, and this is all they do, every day, all day, and they're funded by nation states, very difficult for us to compete against that. When I first started my career, if we passed every six months, we were good. If we miss it by six minutes today, we can be in trouble. So just to give you an idea of how things have changed in IT over the last few years, especially with AI. So we use AI. Threat actors are also using AI. So each side of the ball is using it to speed things up. So you may hear the term machine speed. That's where we're at today. It is challenging for us. You all are targets. I'm sure you're already aware of that. But some of the things that they can deliver to inboxes and other methods are a little bit challenging today. So we'll share this again. I just wanted to, that was busy on purpose. Just to give you an idea of how much we manage. So we have 61 folks in IT, 3,100 staff that fluctuates, as you know. Cloud entities, over 3,600. We have 450 plus servers. That's just on premise, so that doesn't count what we have in the cloud. Network, router switches, all the stuff to connect it and make it work, well over 1,000. So if you start going through this, I'm not going to read all these numbers, but you can see we're around 10,000 pieces of technology that we have to support with 61 folks. That's challenging. Our staff, amazing people. They do an amazing job. Our network and operations group, the things that they can do, it's pretty amazing. So again, just to give you an idea of scale in terms of what we have to protect. Look at network security. So most of you, we have next generation firewalls, import protection. Most of that won't mean anything to you. But the idea is we have current technologies to provide the organization today with protections. Some of those you see, MFA, right? Every time you log in, you use that. Conditional access, identity monitoring. So all these things, if you think about all the complexities. So there's two things probably that you should take away. One, the scale that we have to do today between on-premise and in the cloud. And then the complexity. All of those things are connected. So sometimes I have challenges with departments. in terms of it's in the cloud, we're good. Folks, in the cloud is just another place where it's hosted. It's still all interconnected. So you can say it's good, but you have to get good contractuals, and you have good relationships. The challenge with cloud infrastructure is if we have an incident, and this has happened, where the cloud gets hacked, then we're at the mercy of that vendor to bring our things back online. That can be challenging. I am not against the cloud. I want to make that clear. The cloud has its place, especially when you can get economies of scale. There are options. Sometimes they have tool sets that we can't get. It just makes sense. But it is not the silver bullet either. So we have to be cognizant of when to use it, how to use it, and when it makes sense. Email security, y'all are familiar with that. We do some training. We'll do some more. We're going to amp up that training a little bit more simply because of the new challenges that exist. So what we prevent. Again, I'm not going to go through this, but this is all 30 days. So in the past 30 days, we've had 1,100 alerts. That's ended up in one incident and two tickets. So I shouldn't say this, because it probably freaks people out. So we were hacked this month. We just contained it to a single entity. That's common. Right, so I don't want you to think that, you know, we're, oh, we're, so that happens all the time. Because of the volume, right, and the complexity of our network, I mean, if you think about water utilities, right, our network is spread out clear across the community and outside because, right, we have ASR, we have network there, so really wide base in terms of our network. 79,000 threats were blocked by our firewall in the last 30 days. Again, very common. And you can go through on the email, right, 4,000. So it's a lot. At the end of the day, right, we block a lot of stuff that you never see. And most of this is because I like to call us back of house, if you're a theater person. So people don't see what we do, which is good, right? When I'm in front of you having a conversation, that's usually not a good thing, except for hopefully today. These kind of conversations we can have. Rapid recovery, so that's what we were talking about on Tuesday. Our ability to come back, what we found from the event that we had in 24, was our ability to bring systems back online was not where it needed to be. We were back up in 28 days, which, with our staff and what occurred, was really pretty phenomenal. But what I want is that we can get up in days instead of a month. We can be back up in days. So that's the goal.

How does that compare with other cities?

It will depend on what other cities are doing. Most cities, if you look at, and I'll use this as an example, the city of Dallas had a cyber event, took them six months to come back online, completely. Now, most cities are investing in the same technologies that we are to bring things back, because they understand, right, it is truly not if it's when and and so we have to be prepared for when when happens that we can isolate and then bring systems back up quickly we have to also know that those systems are clean right so in essence what you approved on tuesday allows us to do that

Mike, I was just going to give you all some kudos. I was at a conference, it was 2025, and there was a panel and they were talking about cybersecurity and somebody actually mentioned Wichita and how quickly we responded and that some of the other communities that were presenting on the panel or during the discussion were talking about months, multiple months that it took them and how vulnerable they felt during that entire time, right? Because when you're trying to correct it, it's still

issue so just again kudos to you and your team for really being not only so responsive but an example across the nation and I appreciate that again that's we have phenomenal staff here and of course you can imagine the weeks after that we're I mean a hundred hour weeks were normal for most of our folks including me which is I'm too old for that I'm just telling you So rapid recovery, we will, within the next six months, we'll start having those discussions with the departments so we can have timeframes and have SLAs in place with the departments and through the city manager and again, of course, probably through council to indicate, okay, these systems will be back up in a day or two hours or whatever it might be, but we'll have those in SLAs. Again, just some, one of the challenges we also had, one of our systems had nine terabytes. That doesn't sound like a lot, but when you start thinking about 200 terabytes, 76 million eBooks. So I just wanted to kind of give you reference, because most people can't fathom, right, what's a terabyte? What does that even mean? You look at 370 terabytes, roughly 92,500 high definition movies. So again, it's a lot. So when you have to recover that, Right, just the throughput and getting it back in place when you have those large amounts of data, it's challenging. Right, because your pipes have to be pretty big to move that kind of data. So again, just some of the things in terms of how much data we have here. Okay, so before we do the question answer thing, I wanna show this.

Hey, thanks for hopping on. Super urgent. There's an urgent infrastructure update. I'm going to need your help. Sending you a link now. Hi, it's Lily Wu, mayor of city of Wichita. I never said that or any of this. This is a deep fake video of me. The security team wants to make sure we're all prepared to navigate this new artificial intelligence landscape and protect city of Wichita from these sophisticated attacks.

That's what we're dealing with today. So if you look at large national speakers who tell you, you cannot tell the difference anymore. And this is a guy, this is what he did for insurance companies, law enforcement. They would hire him to determine, is this a good thing or not? He's now saying, between what was real and what's a deep fake. I did that because it's important for you to understand, right? If you're on a team's call and the mayor's telling you to send a credit card, you better call the mayor. Right? You cannot tell today. And that's, like it or not, that's the world we live in. so i just wanted to show you i give you a good example of what's capable today they took a just a still photo of the mayor off the website and found 10 seconds which is available of her voice and just with that through ai they can they can have her say whatever and it can be responsive So if she's on and I ask a question, AI will be able to interpret that and answer that question. So it's not a prescriptive thing. AI can generate that quickly. So I thought that would be fun to end on. Maybe not. Y'all might be freaking out the rest of the day, but I just wanted to give you an indication of kind of where we're at with the technology today. So with that, if you do have any questions, happy to answer those. And that's all I have.

Thank you. Thank you, Mike.

Great, thank you. Yeah, very informative. And so when we talk about cybersecurity, you've got a sense of trying to do the, certainly prevention, but then also if we have to do recovery, we've got both in place. So thank you. Otherwise, Mayor, that concludes everything I've had for you, so enjoy the weekend. If there's anything else you all need, let me know.

Congratulations, Wichita, on getting to host the open rounds of NCAA March Madness next year and 2028. Really want to give a shout out to Visit Wichita, WSU, as well as Interest Bank Arena and the city and county for making this happen. That's how we get to host these events. And I want to say thank you to Councilmember Ballard and Shepherd for encouraging the Navsker Park watch parties. They are continuing, and I've seen people out there. So it's been great.

Thank you.