I'll go ahead and call this meeting on the special finance committee that was announced with the order
this morning. I'm going to motion 27. I'm going to move this to ask for district three. That's already
at large. Sophia McDowell, clerk's office. David Ronald, district four. Jeff McKim, city control. Gretchen
Hap, deputy mayor. Thank you. And we have a member of the public here this morning, which is exciting.
We're going to look at the agenda first.
First, we need to approve the agenda. Short update, Controller McKim following up on a couple of comments
from the public or requests from the public and audit reports, which hopefully won't take a few minutes.
I wanted to, as part of this committee, is kind of look at that that we looked at as a full council
on Wednesday. Just to, there's a couple of changes that I made though. Let's unpack it is the one from
Wednesday. So that's when we raised that string share just to go over those and make sure that there's
nothing else that anybody in this committee at least identifies. And.
Also talk if there's any other kind of budget presentation formatting stuff. So I feel like we talked
about that a little bit more than maybe how it was described in the, in the letter, but like, maybe
it covers it, but I just wanted to get feedback on that. Um, and then I figured that because there weren't
as many things on the agenda for this particular meeting that it might be at the time to talk about
the official salary stuff for the first time, because what I don't want to do is get to, you know, uh,
July or August and all of a sudden.
have to do that kind of for action. So I want to be able to kind of deliberately have a plan about that.
So just kind of talking about what it is that we want to do, making any changes to the budget calendar,
especially with regard to goal setting around election official salaries. And then we're done. So does
that look good, folks? Does anybody want to officially move for approval? Will it be Brittany and Jenna?
Sure. All in favor? Aye. Opposed?
Fantastic. So let's go ahead for the update. Great. Thank you very much. Jeff McKim. I wanted to give
you an update on several of our audit and reporting requirements. I know I provided some background
information in the past, but there are a couple of new pieces of information and several of you asked
me about these requirements recently. I thought I'd provide an update at the meeting. First, there is
the annual financial report or AFR.
The AFR is an unaudited financial filing that all local units of government are required to make each
year by March 1st for the preceding year. Accordingly, we submitted our AFR information on February
27th. The AFR data is submitted via the state's Gateway local government portal, and the actual AFR
report is simply an output of that portal. There's no narrative or customization or even notes. It's
simply a data report that is generated by and available to the public on the Gateway System.
The AFR can be amended at any time, and it is frequently in the early days after submission, particularly
if additional information can be added or errors are discovered or adjustments related to an audit are
made. We've amended ours a couple of times and made well again, especially if there are any audit results
that would require adjustment or if we discover other errors.
In the past, we've exported a version of the AFR and PDF form from Gateway and posted it on the city's
website. Unfortunately, these exported PDF reports do not pass accessibility checkers, and so I'm honestly
still mulling over the best way to handle this. But regardless of whether it's available on our website,
it is available to you and the public in the state's Gateway world.
The AFR data is presented on what's called a cash or regulatory basis, which is the way that we like
every unit of government in Indiana conducts our business. And that means that the ending fund balances,
expenditures, revenues, et cetera, are the same numbers that are shown in our financial system and are
the same numbers that you see while reviewing budgets and considering appropriations. I think for that
reason, this report is of particular interest to you and other folks interested in city government budgeting.
The Annual Comprehensive Financial Report, or ACFR, is the audited financial statement that is required
of all units of government that issue debt. The ACFR is presented according to government generally
accepted accounting principles or GAAP standards, which among other things, presents financial information
on a modified accrual basis.
This provides a much broader view of the unit's overall fiscal health, but is also more challenging
to interpret sometimes because it doesn't match the numbers that we all use and see in budgeting and
operations. Those are those cash basis numbers.
The ACFR is due by the end of September for the previous year's business. As I think you're well aware,
the city has been behind on these required filings for a number of years. I gave City Council a presentation
on this issue back on March 14th, as you remember. The update, though, is that the auditors have actually
scheduled the exit conference with us for Thursday, April 2nd, which means that this very long process
is nearly coming to an end for the 2024 report.
and the audit. A city council member is required for this exit conference and council member Piedmont
Smith will be attending to fulfill this requirement. However, any of you are allowed to attend if you
would like. The exit conference is not a public meeting. And in fact, the information presented is embargoed
until the state board of accounts approves the audit, which is usually a few weeks after the exit conference.
At that point, the ACFR, which the audit is incorporated into becomes public.
for the 2025 Olympics, we are intending to be completely back on track.
We have already provided an extensive amount of required information for 2025 to our gap compiler. This
is the CPA firm that converts our regulatory basis financials to gap financials and have already completed
and turned over some of the most time-consuming inputs, including the actuarial analysis of our pension
and other post-employment benefits liabilities. We hope to beat the statutory deadline of September
30th by a wide margin, but in any case, are confident that we will be fully back in track.
So that's my update. Thank you. Any questions for the controlling? So are there any penalties for lateness
or not having one? We have not been threatened. We have not been threatened. I mean, it's not good to
be late. We have not been threatened with any penalties yet. And like I said, we intend to be fully
back on track for 2025 audit.
Okay. By a fairly wide margin. And the explanation prior was that we had, that we hadn't done it, previous
administration had not completed it. And this was, as you said, on a perl basis. And so you're meaning
by that, that there's balanced funds and things like that. And that prevented the actual, I mean- No,
there were just the re-incapable of doing it today, I guess.
Well, I mean, I can really only answer what, you know, I've only been here since mid January, so I can't
really, for sure, provide much information from before that, other than the city was several years in
arrears and it just took a long time to dig them sand out. And then with the change in controllers also
some kind of momentum at the end of December, during December and early January was lost as well. And just,
It took me a few weeks to get revved up and, you know, get us back on track. Sure. Okay. That's all.
Thank you for the update. Do you anticipate reporting anything from the annual comprehensive answer
report? And then you mentioned that based on its core basis, it'll be tarred for like non-fact as opposed
to interpret.
additional takeaways or things we'll learn or have confidence in from that that we would not from the
AFR that we should synthesize in some way or report out on? What are your thoughts about that? Well,
I don't know that the numbers themselves may or may not be useful to you. I think what you get out of
the ACFR is that it has been audited by an independent auditor who can then
tell you essentially the degree of confidence that you should have in the numbers that are represented
by the city, and to the degree to which they accurately represent the actual state of financial affairs.
Got it. You mentioned the financial assessment of pension funds and other things, and you mentioned
the debt. This is not the issue for any debt-issuing city. Are there assessments of risk in debt-packing
and things like that, or not at all?
Well, only a direct report. I mean, there certainly is a listing of all of our outstanding debts and
the comparison to the constitutional debt limit, which I think we talked about at our last meeting when
the Reedy folks came in. Any other questions?
Great, great. Go ahead and go to public comment then on this topic. Is there any members of the public
who wish to comment on these updates from the controller? Please raise your hand online or I don't know
if the member in the room is interested. There's a chat and we want to hand raise. Okay. I can't quite.
Whichever one you want first, I can do.
Let's go ahead and read the chat message first. I want to control what I'm saying that the AF report
published on the state website does not meet section 508 standards in the same format of AFR file we
published on the city's website. Oh, kind of copy of really long range report reference that the last
fiscal committee needed to be published after the meeting today. Okay. Go ahead and think about those
and go ahead and let Mr. Keough
make his comment. I'm going to go ahead and set a three-minute timer on my watch, and I'll try to give
you a little bit of notice before that. I'll go ahead and re-read Easter Kehoe. All right. Kevin Kehoe.
Yeah, I was hoping there'd be some discussion about the table 12 from the 2023 ACFR and the 2022. There
seems to be some, I think, some obvious errors, especially in light of the really
the consultation you had at your last meeting. I was hoping to hear some more about that. And I wanted
to confirm that the best practice for the ACFR is to have it completed by June 30th. I just want to
make that... That's my research shows, and I know there's some recognized
associations that would back that up. So it's kind of like, sometimes I feel like I'm being gaslighted,
forgive me. But I would think that would be the best practice. And also it would add value that it would
be available to the council so they can review that before they enter into their budget discussions.
And it's just, again, with that table 12, the same thing is going on with the ACFR.
there's changes being made. And I would think that there, and there's a due date of March 1st, but there's
changes being made. And I would think that there would be an audit trail and there would be a process
to document those changes.
I mean, I come from an audit background, so I'm very aware of these type of processes and these required
standards. So again, sometimes I feel like I'm being gaslighted. And I'm doing this, hopefully, in the
goal of transparency. That's the goal, and to add value, because I truly think that there may be some
things that need to be looked at.
to be helped. I'm adding value to actually to help with the system so it can provide this information
that's accurate and timely. So I'm getting quite frustrated and I can't apologize for that. But anyway,
I'm sorry for it. This is off the cuff. I hate to do these off the cuff remarks too, especially within
three minutes because it's incredibly difficult to get these complex ideas out there and to express
them in a way in such a short time.
So hopefully you take these to heart and that's, and I'm sincere about this. I'm not complaining and
I want to make sure if I, I would be so disappointed if it's ever thought that I'm here this morning
just to complain or to some for political type of purpose. This is in the best interest of the city
and all the citizens. So anyway, I'll stop now because I'll probably, my time is probably awful close.
Technically I'm on the 13th. Thank you.
Thank you for that comment. Is there another hand raised? It looks like there is. Eric, go ahead. Good
morning, everyone. Just in follow up to my question about the annual report, PDFs can be put into Section
508 standard format, WCAG 2.1, level AA. And I would request that
Not only controller McKim but the entire city exam and the possibility of continuing to publish reports
in PDF format for a variety of reasons But my other question pertains to and I also asked about the
Reedy Long-range report it would be very helpful if that could be that could be published but the
Reports for 2021 and 2022 had, it looks like they're material misstatements of the long range debt.
And I'm just wondering if that could be verified and any necessary action taken to correct that. It
looks like they are misstated by not using the correct formula. So they're basically, at least that's
what it appears.
Those are my requests and comments this morning, at least on this matter. Thank you. Thank you.
What's that, Eric? Oh, Eric Hoes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. I can't always remember by voice. Thank
you so much. Well, that's realistic. Any other members of the public?
I would like to weigh in on this. Okay, seeing none. I think, you know, in committee meetings, it's
a little bit of a CQC about whether or not we respond, but I do like to respond sometimes to members
of the public in this committee because the finance issues, as Mr. Keoh said, are
really complicated. So, Jeff, would you like to be in it all? Yeah, no, I did want to address the issue
that actually both members of the public mentioned having to do with the constitutional debt limits.
It is true that apparently, not apparently, it is true that there was an error in the statement of the
formula used to compute the constitutional debt limit in the 2022 ACFR report.
It was corrected in 2023 report, although there was still a phrase in there that I think was probably
ambiguous and confusing. But at no point has the city ever exceeded or even come close to the actual
constitutional debt limit. But it is true that in a 2022 report, the table that was used to calculate
the constitutional debt limit,
omitted dividing the assessed value by three, because the way that the constitutional debt limit is
calculated is the net assessed value, 2% of the net assessed value divided by three, and that divided
by three was not included in the 2022 report. Okay. But that was included in the 2023, or that it was
corrected in the 2023 report.
Because the table is correct in the 2020. Right. So basically, so it's not that we ever exceeded that.
It's that the table was wrong. And so if our maximum was really here for one year, we thought it was
here, and then it went back down to here again. Yes. OK. Exactly. That's good to know. Yeah.
Too many people. One is that, so would it be correct to interpret that the third party auditor missed that?
in the reporting? You know, I honestly don't know if that, the ACFR consists of audited and unaudited
parts. So there are narratives, there's discussion that is unaudited, and then there are financials
that are audited. And I honestly don't know if that is an audited, an audited portion or an unaudited
portion. I can find out. Okay. Yeah. So I don't know whether that was something, you know,
the city missed, the gap compiler missed, or the auditor missed, or the report. Got it. Okay, thank you.
And then maybe related, and I think Mr. Kehoe asked a question kind of related to this, like when corrections
do need to be made to the ACFR, like is there any type of like error log or like corrections log or
could that be a thing just for additional? Well, I think you were talking about the AFR in that case.
Yeah, either one. Because we do make changes there. Yeah, I think that would be a good idea. Okay, in
that case, it's not errors, per se, but yeah. I mean, yeah.
I think that's a good idea. It's the sort of thing that if you've been involved in coding, you use GitHub.
You know, for any change, you check the change in and put in a comment. That totally makes sense to
me. This is the gateway system. We don't have any control over it. And like I mentioned in my update,
there's not even a narrative that we can put in there, notes or anything. It's just the output of the
system. I think it would certainly make sense. There's a gateway email address to suggest
features can be added to the system. Yeah, I mean, it seems like we could even just, it sounds like
we're working through accessibility questions about publishing AFR outputs on our own website, but even
if we had a hub that just explained to folks how to access it, and we could track with an update log
there also, so we could just take it in our initiative. We wanted to, yeah, thank you. That's a good
suggestion. Great. Any other follow-ups from the public?
I think there was a request for the reading report. Oh yeah. Cause like everything that really showed
was already in that packet. But is there another like, cause they like reference some stuff. We do not
have the final long range report because they are still updating it from the December 31st financials.
Once the books were closed out, once we receive it, we'll have to remediate it and make it PDF accessible.
And we will certainly make it available.
Great, thank you. Okay, moving on then to the budget priorities and the refinements. So let me make
sure that I can screen share the right thing. And.
Wonderful. So this was the letter that the kind of draft memo that I wrote based on our last deliberation
session and based on the rankings that we did. So I realized that when I edited this, I didn't.
and I didn't put it involved and didn't factor it in, so I'm just going to have to go down and remember
all things from Wednesday that when I got feedback on Wednesday and I asked for feedback about certain
things, they changed. Councilmember Sarney mentioned guiding principles stuff and wanting to make sure
that the plans were referenced as guiding principles, and so I added in this sentence here about the
long-range plans
or the city plans serving as guiding principles to our discussions and our original list of outcomes
that came directly from these plans. And I think that that's the only thing that I changed in that paragraph.
I put in an extra note about how that is a ranked list based on the council member voting and that link
goes to the
Uh.
actual compiled spreadsheet of everybody's ranking of those. It's like that source documentation as
much as we have of it because that was shared for the sake of the public. I don't think I mentioned
how that was actually shared. I couldn't figure out quite how to do a Google Form so that everybody
could take their 100 points and assign them to places. I made an individual Excel spreadsheet for every
council member and shared it just with the single council member. Then I took all of those and I put them into
A compiled spreadsheet. So then everybody's results were on the same thing. And so that that was shared
as part of the packet of them to say Wednesday that have that source in it. So that is what that is
linked to. We referenced. I think all of that is the same.
And people seemed okay with number six being changed to inclusive and strong local economy. I changed
number seven to expansion of options other than uniformed police officers for non-violent offenses.
Council Member Peebe Smith wanted a little bit of word smithing on that to acknowledge that there are
some of those programs that already exist. And council members like agreed with that.
I think those are all of the changes in there. And then I added this last paragraph here. Thank you
for considering these priorities. And I was trying to remember when I was doing this yesterday,
I was like, are there, did we really just discuss this at four meetings?
in terms of the administration reviewing the full meetings and materials to go to more source data.
I wanted feedback on that too. There was the December deliberation session, the March deliberation session,
and then we discussed it a couple of times in here in February in preparation for that deliberation
session. What was that? All of the in-person discussions, because then there were also, there were all
those people forms and folks and all of
that data from those Google Forums is shared in one or more of those meetings listed. But am I forgetting?
Like, I felt like I was forgetting something, maybe because? I think that was it on the concept of version
sessions. It was just tattooed. OK. Yeah. And that's it. So any feedback from you guys? Any other things
that you've been noodling over? Any concerns? I don't recall.
Your last question. Meetings, but I just want it's just a small thing. I wondered if we could just hyperlink
the plans that are referenced. Oh, okay. Okay. Safe streets for all planning and financial plan. Perfect.
A note here to myself to hyperlink. I had a meeting with the comprehensive plan. I know you asked that
kind of Wednesday. I mean, some of these
This is the set of, we've talked about the inconsistency with respect to how outcomes are written, whether
they're smart or not in various plans, but those comprehensive plan, I think goals did make it into
our list for review. And so some of this is sourced from that. Okay, with the comprehensive plan. And
then it looks like the,
List is is a ranked order. So like this. Yes, which I think. Maybe that's clear to those. Should I put
the point values for the council member voting on or just even I wonder just like an additional clause
to clarify like. The level list is in order of priority based on this exercise. Yeah, I.
I know it says identified and ranked. Yeah, it says ranked a couple of times. So maybe I need to use
a synonym for ranked or describe this process a little bit more. Like you could say that priority outcomes
were identified and ranked with the highest priority items. OK. Or you know, something like that. I'll
keep working on this to find this slang process.
OK. And first step, you're not taking control of the camera in the room right now. So hopefully, you'll
realize that it is. It's clearly noted. Yeah. But it is. I guess then it's clear. I'm looking at the
version with the idea. OK. Yeah. Just something different. Yeah. I mean, I think that it's worth trying
to figure out a second word to use besides granting. Right. Or a description process or something.
and maybe just putting the points from the council member voting in there. If I describe the process
of how that happened, because you guys were kind of involved to some degree, at least in the planning
of that, or one or more of the meetings around when we discussed the process of how we were going to
do this, that does not mean that you're going to remember all of those details. And that's helpful to
throw them in here. So all right. Good. Any other comments, concerns?
Want any of those? OK, great. That is super helpful. So then, hopefully, the goal is to have this memo
approved by the full council next week at the Wednesday meeting. And that can be the official given
to you guys. And then in terms of, I guess that's the other big thing, in terms of budget presentations,
So what I said in here, interested in hearing how certain programs and expenses are supporting these
priorities and splitting those expenses out to the greatest extent possible, including considering direct
expenses, staff time, and if the expense falls into more than one priority area. So that was something
where I was trying to incorporate things that we've talked about in terms of y'all's goals in terms
of the shift to outcome-based budgeting with the reality that
You can't necessarily separate everything right now, but like starting with some things. So is, and
that we wanted to see as part of budget presentations, those details for how that was going, at least
with this list, even if you can't do it with everything else. So that was like the goal. And when I
was thinking with that sentence, is that clear? Whoever wants to answer that, that's a member is for
Jeff reflection.
I mean, it is clear. I will say that there, that is still a relatively large number of, uh, of priorities.
And, you know, pretty much any association specific budget items and costs is going to require some
kind of manual action on the part of both department heads and us. So, um, Yeah, there's, there's that
and, um, I think.
You know, I look at number four, which is a goal. I think we all have increasing housing diversity,
but the neighborhoods predictability decreasing. Those are not necessarily budgetary items. Those are
process items. So when I was looking at this, I was thinking that, you know, we're always trying to
balance the numbers part takes a lot of time and separating out the numbers that we're all interested
in seeing as time consuming.
So how can we use the narrative space wisely so that we're not creating 800 pages and people are only
reading the, you know, 100 pages that they're interested in? So it may be that what we could try to
do is create a memo for the budget book about each of these and address some of these issues that maybe
are not budgetary issues, but just say, you know, what are we doing on these? If it's not a, if there's
not a dollar amount attached to it,
What are we doing? And it may not be a formal named initiative, but what's the plan? For example, decreasing
permitting wait times is really important for every one thing. Probably doesn't have a lot of dollars
attached to it. Yeah, and I think on the piece here, if we can talk about dedicated staff time, that
makes it easy for some programs where, for example,
The City Homelessness Response Coordinator, we know everything he does is homelessness. It's easy to
allocate his entire salary to something. For folks who work on multiple projects, it's much harder to
separate out, you know, 20% of their staff time is spent on this, that, or the other thing.
So there may be, if we can think about, and maybe this is just a communication issue between us and
council, we can clarify in the packet that when we do put numbers together,
We're talking about 100% dedicated or something that's pretty easy to split 50-50, not 10%, 5%, 2%,
that kind of slicing and dicing. I don't think it's very helpful or easy to do. And the other thing
that I think I would like to acknowledge here, and we'll just have to keep, I think, educating ourselves
and the public on this over and over again, is that in particular, infrastructure projects have so many
different funding sources.
And the opportunities, it's a real juggling game of what are the funding sources? What can we afford?
What are the needs? And so it's very hard to say ahead of time, oh, we're going to do this particular
neighborhood project and it will cost exactly this amount. And because there are so many, you know,
if we make another repair at the same time, it saves costs on both, but you can't really split it out.
So there may be some stuff like that, but I think we can get to the top-level numbers on some of those
and start setting a baseline for folks in comparison, which is I think part of what we're interested
in seeing is year over year. To address some of what you just said to make sure that council members
are good with how it's phrased and that you're good with how it is in this letter, that you see it.
First of all, with the staff time,
intentionally out of the work dedicated before staff time. And so maybe that meets your requirement
and for council members, does that still kind of meet a grade that we are interested in, like a for
now kind of? Sure. Yeah. I expressed at our December, uh, deliberation session on this, um, skepticism
about the utility of labeling things based on these prioritize
Priorities and the, and the particularly that the effort required to do that. Uh, I know we did kind
of something like it in priority areas last year in the budget and I appreciate the effort on that,
but I, I just, just being honest, I didn't, didn't find it very useful. And, um, I mentioned, I'm not
saying this is the right system, but I mentioned it at the previous administration at the department's
head. Uh, I think.
I had to look at it to know the exact details. I always felt like we had a little bit better clarity.
They kind of listed by funds and category what was going on and kind of tried to tell you what the major
expenses were in those areas, which I found helpful. Another thing they did that I found helpful was
they had goals, departmental goals for the year, and they would report on the previous year's goals
and set some for the coming year, ideally,
those would be, you know, aligned with city planning and policy documents. And there was usually
a cross-cutting theme, too, of like a few buckets of like meta-priorities, say like climate action and
resilience, and then like, you know, departments could have particular goals on those fronts. And I
think that also addresses some of the questions around like, you know, the increased housing diversity
within neighborhoods, right? A lot of that, there's going to be costs entailed. There might be people
at the workshops, other things, but a lot, and you know, consultants costs, whatever, but a lot of that's
going to be
process, code change, you know, et cetera, and not easy to quantify in budgetary terms, but nevertheless,
a priority that I think is worthy of discussion in the budget context. It's like, cause staff can do
myriad things and we could be in a totally reactive posture or we can say, we're going to get these
things done. Or the number one priority for planning and transportation staff this year is to accomplish like,
this set of processing code changes and like that's their number one target and that's going to dictate
where the time's going and you know what I mean? So yeah. So to reflect that in terms of this letter,
what I just put in was a note for me, right, to add to the budget presentation something about department
goal setting and then... I'm not saying it's necessarily needed, I'm just I'm workshopping I think what
Yeah, but similarly and supporting these priority outcomes and so adding something into that idea to
leave that space for, you know, we're working toward this in this like multi-year kind of fashion or
would that meet some of the needs on both ends? I mean, personally, I feel like the letter, our discussion
about the letter is as helpful as the letter itself. So I mean, you know, the public may benefit from
seeing every single detail of our conversation work back into this letter.
But I feel like the purpose of this committee is to work on details. And so if we keep going back to
trying to make it appear everywhere, it sort of defeats the purpose of having a committee.
So I get the point. And I do think that listing out what are the specific programs that meet some of
these goals, because that may even be hidden from some of us, even if we can't break out the number
of what's attached to it because of how the program works. What's the program? What are the goals?
if we can keep that simple. So just, you know, for the benefit of the public and maybe Brian or council
members, you know, the, the kind of goal planning that was done in the past was extraordinarily intricate
and included down to the level of how many proclamations should be issued in a year, how many press
releases should be sent a year. Those were all considered goals. So I would like to focus our work on
meaningful goals instead of set a goal for every single thing that you do.
even if it's something that you fill by demand, that you do until the money runs out. There are a lot
of programs like that. X amount of funds, you use them to the best of your ability. Do you have something
more on this? Which is just thinking about getting toward what we would collectively find both feasible
and useful.
Would it make sense to use feature meeting kind of like workshop, something more like a template or
a proto, you know, design or, or, you know, the presentation. What I would love to do is to work with
our teams and create models that we think we can do and that we think address rooms and then bring that
to you rather than have this group go back and bring it to you. Yeah. I think that would be helpful.
Yeah. And through iteration, I think we can get to that. Yeah. Right.
We give a lot of information and you come up with something and we hope it's a lot of grades. And I
know you probably want me to tell you what is what you will bring that. I don't know. I am writing a note.
Let's make sure that I have that on my radar in her major agenda setting so that then I can check back
in with it at some point. I have another meeting that I have to- That's fine. I do just want to get
to the last couple of things that you mentioned in terms of the slayer. First off, I did make sure to
say to the greatest extent possible understanding that
you know, to the greatest extent possible to give you a little bit of space, but also the paragraph
above that, um, that we realized the priorities require different levels of investment approaches, including
that policy updates for community partners, programs, and legislative change, which I think that's one
of the other things that you were talking about in terms of that narrative, that it's not all like budget
numbers and hard numbers that are meeting some of these different things. Um, and I think there was
one more thing too that I,
You know, maybe I qualify and there would just be timelines of action. So, for example, increasing housing
deficit, well, I would not say we will come to that in one year. That is 80 years long. We won't know
necessarily the impact of some of the changes that you guys will make to legislation or that we'll propose,
plus process changes. We won't see that impact for a little bit longer. We'll see it in the front, at
least the leading educators, but not after.
Right. Okay. And I think that that was the last thing. Yeah. I think the challenge to the leader that
caters becomes the target, you know, like that's what we were trying to address. Yeah. Okay. Any other
comments on this or ways that you think that I should or could or need to make it better before next
Wednesday?
I would just say I appreciate hearing anything that would make the budget presentations more useful
and interesting to all of you. There's department heads put, and the administration puts a lot of effort
into those. And if it's not useful or boring or whatever, then we want to instead present information
that is useful. Could we spend a future meeting like maybe comparing a single department's
budget presentation over the course of a little bit of a past series and then just talking about what
because council members find useful or not, and you need to put some thought to that at a time. I would
love to hear that. Yeah. Yeah. One other thing I mentioned previously, Jeff, is getting better clarity
on the inputs, the revenue sources for each fund, including inter-fund transfers where that occurs,
because I just, I don't know, maybe it's the way my brain works, I find a fund
approach to budgeting just a little counterintuitive where it's like, here's the money. Uh, but like
when you want to think about like issues at the level, I think that we're supposed to be thinking of
is like, you know, kind of physical policy and like, what are we doing with the money we have? Where
can we make shifts and can we make changes that affect the amount of money we have and all that, right?
Like having a better control of revenue is really helpful. And I feel like we had, I never got to a
point where I was satisfied with, with, um, uh, controller, um,
Thank you for throwing wood like put together on that front. And that's something I'd love to like workshop
in advance to go just
Yeah, I'm always happy to give any kind of presentation on revenue that you'd like to see. And you're
right that the transfers between funds do just make things more difficult. I mean, you know, the money
is transferred from the general fund to Sophia Travis to the alternative transportation for sidewalks.
There are various transfers back and forth that kind of cloud rather than
Yeah. Yeah. I was going to say, maybe he just went into this county for some reason. Yeah. Yeah. I was
thinking of the form of a table or something like that. I mean, that's already complex. I don't know.
But anyway, that's great. I actually already started making this sort of a box diagram that shows the
transfers between homes and stuff.
I haven't had time to finish it yet, but it's the sort of thing that might be actually useful to my
budget now. Not that I should ask, but could I just ask a question about funds transfers? Because there
was a housing fund that was utilized by the Hamilton administration that they were approved from developers
and then used it for that affordability purposes. They would subsidize other developers in
the quest for affordable housing, especially permanent. And is that still operational? Yeah, it is definitely
still in existence. I'm not aware of. The fund balance would be helpful to know as we go forward talking
about that. At some point. And HAND is using some of that money this year for some of their programs.
I figure it's still existed. I just need some references to it. I think under the current HAND leadership
and administration,
they're leaning more into payouts in lieu and I think it's over in project affordability. So it's actually
probably directing more money into that ostensibly, but yeah, knowing a little bit more on how we're
using that in the impact. That would be helpful. And specifically we had a decision about payment in
lieu of surrendering their commitment to the affordability of running auto.
Does that money, I think a million dollars, did that land in a fund? I can generate a report on that.
I think it did. It might also, like to those questions, it might be more useful to have, like Anna,
probably as a guest in this meeting, to give a little bit more details about how some of those programs
are working. And that, I think, you know, it veers into this other
And if they know we've already been talking about like how can we best use this meeting time like what
is this committee for like what can we do and I think one of the answers is there so many things to
do that sometimes it feels overwhelming about what to do. But one of one of our topics could be like
having specific department heads come in to give us a more specific sort of
report on a particular fund or how they're utilizing a specific sort of thing or I mean, bond projects
maybe and because Controller McKim can tell us about what the numbers look like, but can't necessarily
tell us about some of the like soft impacts related to how those numbers are being spent. And those
are also, I mean, I think that's also a topic that's relevant for us as a committee. So I wrote that
down as a note to you about, you know,
getting Anna in here. And that's something that I asked some would like through the budget session last
year about how some of those programs are going. Because I think that it was, because we put money into
that from the Housing Development Fund for budget year 2025 for her to start some more kind of programs.
And at budget time last year, they were still kind of in the early stages. And I'm pretty sure that
money got budgeted for that in 2006 as well.
And so she might have, you know, especially in a couple of months after the, the well stuff quiet down
a little bit and she's able to give, or maybe one of her other staff members may also be able to give
a good report. Well, I was thinking, you know, Matt's reference to broad buckets, like Plum in Action
Resilience, but we have a couple of departments here in ESD or women over here who focus on specifics
just to, you know,
Yeah. And just answer that the housing fund is about $5 million. But I can't answer how it's being spent.
Sure. All right, great. Anything else about the letter? I really appreciate you drafting it. It's something
I very well think it's wonderful. The pinky little thing for accessibility is the Roboto font.
Oh, okay. Is the best. Okay. Thank you. Sure. What is the best? Robotom. Like the song. Yeah. Okay.
Thank you. That's helpful. Why is that? Do you know? It's just like magic. There are recommendations,
but also screen readers. It's the best ones. Robots. Things can change. Yeah, basically. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay, let's go to members of public. If anybody has any comments about the priorities letter, the process
by which we've done about this. We have a member of public coming to the table right now. Go ahead,
Mr. Engy. Well, who can do first names here on this committee? Thank you, Hope. Of course, Mr. Engy,
great to be in the Chamber of Commerce.
the physical solvency of the city is one of the main topics, both the county and the city that we talk
about in our advocacy meetings monthly. So I want to just say how important this body is and the physical
health of the city or future economic growth of it. I mean, just a couple of things. I don't want to
get into the minutiae too much of the letter, but you're pretty far into it on those 2027 priorities.
But I'm just, when we look at
Last year, I remember around April, we talked about outcome-based budgeting, and I worried it was just
too all-encompassing to move forward with. And we still need to sort of look in that lens. I think the
administration and the council agreed on that. And what lends itself to that is specifically the John
Hopkins funds and that hand housing fund we talked about. Here is the money we spent on
these housing programs, this is what we got for it. And so I think that is where it's going to be really
helpful. You can start on those two entities and also explain to the public what we're getting from
that. I think you read about these payments and we don't know what's going into it. I think, you know,
the chamber has been in support of that means to sort of help on the edges with down payment assistance
in order to things can really have some impact other than sort of laborious compliance issues
with out-of-state developers. And then the other thing on the 2000 priorities is I always wanna make
sure we're not doing too many platitudes on that that can't really be, that aren't really doable.
I mean, no fatalities or homelessness. Some of that is just very broad. And I think having this body
or even the larger council look into, we have a homeless coordinator.
And we already have heading home, but we have a specific person within the mayor's office that should
be our expert on this coming in and going, well, where can budgetarily, we can kind of fill in some
cracks. Food security is the same way. This is not really an operation of the city. It's a bigger, larger
issue. So looking at on that lens a little bit where the city can kind of come in and
have specific funding measures to help those cracks and then have outcomes that they can show to what
that goes into that. I mean, I have a lot of notes about some other long-term fiscal issues that we
discussed. Was that last week or the week before that I missed? But I'll say that for another time that
I do appreciate this body and the work that they are doing. Thanks. Thank you. Is there anybody online
who wants to comment about the budget earnings slide?
I was going to ask how you wanted to handle the chats. They've been kind of continuously coming in.
Yeah, I would say maybe copy paste them and send them. Maybe if maybe I'll do that, actually, because
I'm technically in here and then I then you don't have to take that as a responsibility right now.
but if I can copy and paste them and get them into a Google Doc and then maybe publish them as a Nintendo.
We can get that also from the Zoom in stuff and I can show you later. Okay, yeah. I don't have access
to Perch Zoom, so. If you're a goal post, it automatically does to you. Nice, okay. It should, okay.
So you can share your focus. Yes, so I'll make sure that all of those chats get out because it's also
important that the whole public sees those chats, especially since there are several of them today.
So yeah, I will help me remember to do that before I leave, because we're supposed to adjourn in six
minutes. All right. Thank you guys so much for that. I'm going to stop my screen share, because I'm
going to move on to the next agenda item, which is talking about the elected official salary. And we
only have a couple of minutes to do this. So in the packet, there was,
Oh, dear. I'm not going to bother trying to do this right now. In the packet, there was the elected
salary framework that was developed a couple of years ago. And it had to get like our staff just did
a quick change to put it into a Google Doc as opposed to that.
a nicely laid out PDF that it was in. And I did email that to folks last night to remind you of how
that looked. And then I was going to try to do the screen share on it. Let me try again and see if now
it will. There it is. And the basic question that I wanted to answer today, I think, in terms of how
much time do we have,
Is kind of that overarching how do we want to handle elected official salaries this year, especially
because next year is a city election year. And 1 of the things that we talked about in the past was
this idea of trying to make these positions accessible enough, especially the council position, because
that's the 1 that really doesn't have. Like enough salary attached or.
slow survival on this, like it's not a full-time job kind of thing, and how we want to do that with
kind of a new crowd of folks who might be stepping up to hope. Okay. So we don't have time to go over
details, but I think the basic question is, do we want to do something like this as a committee this
year, maybe basing it off of
how this happened, you know, acknowledging that Matt and I were both part of this before, so we at least
kind of know like our sequence and like how we talked through some of that stuff. Yeah, how the program
was involved and what their guidance was and everything. Right. And then kind of bring us through kind
of a similar thing to, you know, think about guiding principles and basis of salary setting. And I know
Councilor Morello or Dave, going back and forth between formal and
Casual say, uh, you really advocated for more of a basis of salary setting being on comparisons with
pure cities. And so, like, going back and doing more of that research again, because, I mean, we kind
of did that research a couple of years ago, um, and like, updates management since then, in terms of
what, what other pure cities around and done. And so, like, do we want to, as a committee kind of do
this thing. Or do we want to do something else? So, um,
Yeah, we kind of discussed this over the last couple of years. Obviously, we have kind of a wide range
of opinions on it on the council. I wanted to know on our salary ordinance last year because to me,
to support it, I feel like it needs to have some basis other than this is what it was last year. And
I'm not saying that
what it was last year and what pure cities make can't be a factor in the amount we set. But if those
are the sole factors to me, that's not a sound enough policy basis. I recognize that nobody shares that
view, but that's just my view. I do think this process we went through in 2024 with the consultants
from Pro was following a logical framework in terms of
Uh, the same principles and trying to align to the maximum extent feasible for elected positions, which
are unique in some ways to the, um, the compensation framework of how, you know, um, like level
of responsibility, uh, you know, level of expertise required things like that from, from the overall,
you know, city salary compensation framework updates, uh, which I think is worthwhile. So I still feel
like the, the.
The core of this, the framework, the principles is sound. I think where we then ran into trouble is
that that led to a recommendation that had a sticker shop dimension of like, this is a lot different
than what it is now. And plus the dimension that all legislatures face everywhere, which is that it's
impossible to avoid the appearance of self-healing when you have, when you have a statute already required
to set your own salary.
Um, and, uh, you know, people gravel that in different ways. So, so that's, that all makes this difficult
for a number of reasons. I think I would find it worthwhile to try and, or I'm sorry, we're trying to
wrap up. I think I would find it worthwhile to engage in this and see if we could get closer to, um,
consensus or majority buy in for a basis of salary setting.
that maybe looked at a multi-factor approach, moving beyond what's in this PDF to like, okay, this is
a factor and like this framework is a factor, but so too is current sale, so too is a peer analysis
and like balancing those in some way. But yeah, I don't know, I'll leave it there. Okay, so basically
like the short answer is yes, you support us doing something like this.
I slowed down because the annual process that we discussed at the time was in April, we validate, we
update the framework, we figure it out, we gather information, and then we actually do the organs in
August. I'm actually on time for figuring out how to do this right now. Dave, do you agree that the
concept of having a framework, having something that you want to pursue in terms of this work?
I think it's, yes, I think it would be helpful. And as Matt alluded to, the timing was, I think, a real
problem. And for both the previous proposal, my amendment, which ended up being adopted, was kind of
reactionary to the timing and to the us being an outlier relative to other communities. I thought the
report was excellent in terms of reviewing
duties and everything that we did, but what was lacking was any reference to peer cities. So that to
me has to be included as well. But yeah, so I think it's a good idea to continue discussing this this
year with the effective date of the pay raise after the election.
I don't think that we can do that in the actual legislation. If we have a framework for that, we can
figure out a way maybe to. If we adopt the year of the, so the effective date would be the following year.
Yeah, part of the idea was that if people are making decisions about whether or be able to run for office
at all, they actually need that information this year, right? So, like, at the end of this year, we're
going to adopt for next year, which is a year, another year of our return. And that's the only thing
that we can for sure adopt. We could put a recommendation in for the next year, but there's no guarantee
that we would actually do it. But either way, I will write that up a little bit because it's 930 right now.
we can move forward on that. I think that it's really helpful actually on this committee this year to
have both of you on it, just because you represent opposite ends of some of this. I think that that's
a great way to figure out where there's a meeting point that people can live with and respect and feel
is useful. Great. Public comment then around
This framework, this process, really it's not necessarily about this framework. It's about the idea
of this body going forth and doing that task as part of our work. Any members of the public? There's
one person with their hand up. There's a meeting in this room. Yeah, Kevin Keough. Again, I had to.
Go ahead, Evan, kind of quickly because we're going to be chased out of this room in a minute. Okay.
I just wanted to add in the chat a comment about, you know, I hope the council views their elected positions
as more of a, not as a job, but as fiduciaries. And I make that point there that, you know,
I know there was comments last time, and it really concerned me. This is the key meeting, that December
meeting 2024, I believe, where you discussed this, and it really caught my attention. So yeah, this
has been the key thing that got me involved. So anyway, I just want to add that comment that I feel
strongly about that.
And I would hope you don't try to measure it. I've tried this task too in the past, using the median
income for the city as kind of a base and the due percentage of that. But that went by the wayside.
But anyway, I feel strongly about this. So thank you very much. Thank you. Any other public comments
around this, Papa? All right.
Thank you so much. The note, the last agenda item about the calendar. I will update the calendar with
some goals related to the elected salary stuff for the next meeting. And unless there's anything else
about the calendar or for the good of the order. Thank you. We are adjourned. Two weeks from now is
our next meeting. Thank you.