2027 Proposed Budget Hearings - Day 1.

Do you have, from the administration side, what that would look like as far as cuts? So, if we only roll forward the general alimony, what would be off of the chopping block, if we did? Yeah, I mean, it's a basic math proposition. So, again, if you have, let's just take the one that you said first, Council Member. If you took the general alimony plus you did the city dedicated services, that's roughly $21.5 million. Then, that subtracts from the $77 million that is there. So, you take the $77 million minus, essentially, $21.5. You get to, what, like $56.5 at that point. So, you know, it is, this is part of what we're trying to explain overall is that it's a series of choices, and I keep on saying this because it's how we feel, it's a menu of options. Right. And the option is, number one, we need to make $77 million of cuts. Here are the proposed ones, and obviously all of these meetings will be leading towards which ones are more potentially acceptable than others. And then next, in the realm of $77 million of cuts, if there's additional revenue that's raised, then which of those cuts come off of the board as a result of that, and again, these are the ones that you could say would do it. I mean, and just to completely answer your question, Councilmember, you know, the outside ones, I think you have to ask those agencies how it inerts to the benefit of the city. And obviously, they're going to have their own answers about the benefits of the library and early childhood education, but that is not money that would directly come to the general fund itself. Yeah, I guess my question is a little more pointed. Are there, is there a revision of the proposed cuts that we saw in the budget that the administration would present to us if we decide on one scenario versus another? I think it would be, it would be, Councilmember, it would be a conversation between everybody about what it ought to be. I mean, I, I, well, I just, I say that because, look, this is, this is a dialogue. We present the budget as the administration. The Council approves. I think it would be a mistake for us to say, well, these are the ones that we think, and who cares what the Council has to say. And so we want that to be a very active conversation. Right. So that you and your colleagues are not only listening to your constituents and getting feedback in real time, both in public and social media and the media and other venues. So it would definitely be a continued dialogue and trying to make sure that we get broad consensus. I understand. On the millage sheet, we did get a revised, what the scenarios would be as far as individual homeowners, I think on Monday. Is this posted anywhere for the public to see? I don't know. Look at Abby. Where is she? I don't know that it's posted yet, but we, I mean, we provided it to the press. So obviously I have zero problems posting it online where the other information is posted as well. Okay. It would be great if we could get that posted. Sure. Councilmembers, do, Councilmember King. Good morning, Council, CEO Drew. So you mentioned that this is a dialogue and I've heard, it's kind of frightening the amount of misinformation I've been hearing surrounding the millages. I get it. No one wants tax to go up $1, one penny, but the amount of just false information, I think even sometimes purposely that's been sent out surrounding these millages is alarming. And I asked you last time you spoke, what is the consequences if we don't have millages rolling forward? We're talking about the neutral ground grass not being cut. We're talking about possibly just overall quality of life issues getting worse. And I don't think that is being explained as clear as it can be. So my question is, does the administration in your office have any plans, like we did the budget, the budget previews past few weeks, are there any plans to do the same thing, to go to different communities and say, this is the truth about this. It was just said, your property tax isn't going to go up $100 a month. It may go up $5 a month, it may go up $8 a month. Are we going to try to educate the public as much as possible so they can know all the facts and have as much real factual information as possible, opposed to the sky is falling, social media, print media, every other media that's, you know, the information that's being put out? Yeah. I mean, A, I would say that process started at the budget community meetings because it was certainly being reported as we're in the middle of those meetings. So the information continued to come up. And even at those meetings, we knew that there was consternation and address those questions. I think the part that we can discuss very clearly with people is these are the things that we know as of right now are part of our proposed cuts and what that potentially looks like. But at the same time, I think we would have to say, hey, this may not be the landing spot. It is the starting spot. That is the phrase the council used repeatedly. And then also it depends on what obviously happens with the rule four. If there isn't a rule four, then we know that there has to be $77 million in corresponding cuts. If there aren't, then these are the type of things that need to be saved. And then we talk to people, and particularly I would think the council members, because it's going to be, I think, just candidly council members, slightly different from community to community. And council members are going to have different requests within those cuts than other ones. And so how do we work together? But I know that certain council members are having their own community meetings coming up on those. I know that they've also asked the administration to participate or at least be available at those. And obviously, we're happy to do that, too. Thank you. Council Member Willer. Thank you, Chairwoman. Just a couple of questions, Joe. Can homeowners in New Orleans pay their property tax bill monthly? Not that I'm aware of.

Same. So the only reason I flagged that is because when we talk about how much the increase will be, when we break it down per month, I don't think that's totally fair because they have to pay it at the time it's due. And if they don't pay it at the time it's due, they start to incur interest penalties. So I don't think we should talk about it like that. Also, I mean, I agree with some of what Council Member King was talking about. But when we talk about, you know, the potential roll forward, I think we also need to talk about, and I brought it up last week, people with special assessment levels right now with increases, they still will pay more with the roll forward regardless of how much that roll forward is because the millage rate, when the millage rate goes up, their expense, their property tax bill will go up. So I would just urge you to keep communicating. And something else that you mentioned when you first started speaking was that, you know, this is kind of a starting point. This is the budget that was presented to the council. But we can make those changes. We can make changes with given revenue that we have right now without increasing revenue and decide and prioritize what should be preserved, what should be cut, move things around. And so I just want to urge the public to keep chiming in and reaching out to us based on, you know, what you think is the most important in this budget. But thank you for being transparent and up front with us, Joe. Yeah. You got it. And to that point, to segue, Abby just let me know that her office is putting up a webpage that should be available this week. So we want to provide people information to be able to see for themselves. Thank you. And I guess can I just add one thing? I mean, I'm making a promise with Abby with my back to me, but, you know, the goal to me would be also for people to be able to, I want to use the right words here, to be able to toggle through what the options look like. So if it's the full roll forward, this is what the impact would be either on a yearly or a monthly basis. If this is what happens and this is what it looks like. So that way people can see the effect based on what portion or portions of the proposition for them, which is what you're looking for. It would be great to have an interactive, as you're talking about, where you can put your home value, say $352,000, and you can toggle through. So I don't know if we have the capacity to do that. Abby's shaking her head yes. If we could do that, that'd be great. Council Member Green, do you have any questions on millages? The challenge with coming in a little bit late is that I couldn't hear everything. So I just want to say, could you just state how long it's been since the city rolled forward a millage that benefited the city of New Orleans? Because voters have voted on millages that have gone to early childhood education, Audubon Institute and other parks. But in terms of the roll forward that covers the potential increases in city government, how long has it been? Yeah. So, Council Member, if my memory is correct, the council did not roll the millages forward in 2023 in light of the fact that we were still coming off of COVID and all the money that the city had. And as somebody from the public pointed out, Ida as well, right, there were still the impacts of Ida being. So there was zero roll forward in 2023. In 2019, the council led an effort to roll forward, generally, the public safety and general alimony millages, I think maybe even sewage and water board, but they didn't roll forward other ones. So it wound up being revenue neutral. So the effect was of a no roll forward as a practical matter, even though there was an elegance of rolling some forward and rolling some back. So the last time, Council Member, my understanding they've been rolled forward all the way is 2015. 2015. So 11 years ago, by the start of the year, 12 years ago. Okay. It's important to recognize, no matter what your position is, that some things have changed relative to city budget. For example, we as a city pay persons who work for us $15 an hour and up. And it does increase the cost of our contracts versus others who can pay minimum wage or just get wages, pay people whatever they want to pay them. But we've also had some sort of, some other increases in city budget in the last 11, how many years was it? 11 years. 11 years. We've had some sort of increases. Are we impacted by increases, for example, in insurance anywhere? Sure. I mean, Council Member, I think that- I know. You know where I'm going with the question. Yeah. Just feel free, Joe. I know you've been on the council eight years and you recognize that there have been some changes in the last 11 years. Well, again, I'd point to two things. One is, you're right, things have gotten more expensive. I mean, that's just the nature of usually how the world works. And again, city government is no different than that. Number two is, I also think it's important because the council has demanded this, that we also put a budget forward that has things that we know are items that need to be included, right? So, for example, the increased healthcare costs of nearly $30 million were being included in this budget. The debt service that was- not included in the last budget, is being included. That's $18 million. We're including the retention pay and the terminal leave pay, which are about $5 million. So again, that council member creeps up the expenditure side because we're saying collectively, we want to make sure that we are both being transparent and ensuring that our city employees are getting the benefits that they have, but at the same time, you have to have revenue that meets those expenses. So you have both things happening simultaneously, and I think sometimes that second part of the conversation, getting 100% right, things have gotten more expensive.

Yes, and we also now are budgeting for significant line items that were not accounted for before, and as a result of that, the expenses at this moment until the budget is passed, we need to make sure the expenses and revenues match. Crime is down significantly in our city, and we've stemmed the tide of the loss of police officers, but one way we did so was as a city council to make additional revenues available that would pay police better and also provide bonuses. Could you talk about the impact that that had on the city's budget and in terms of public safety? Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of things there. Number one, I can give an overall number that I think, again, I want to give credit to my office of performance accountability folks. They estimated that the across-the-board pay increases for city employees, including police, fire, and others, is roughly $26 million for just this year. So again, you're not talking about an insignificant amount of money. It's part of the whole piece that goes into where we are, and obviously, that will carry forward into the next year as well. And then, you had the largest retention bonuses this year for NOPD. Remember, the council, at the request of the last administration, had those retention, the higher retention bonuses for 23, 24, 25, and for 2020, and I guess partially this year, too, and we were close to several million dollars. And of course, remember, part of that was the $6 million that was budgeted for wasn't available, so then the administration had to go find it. So those things all add up, council member. So you talk about, again, people who are leaving the city who have time, that terminal leave is a number, retention payments, we're budgeting around $5 million, $5.5 million for next year. You have the salary increases, which are $26 million for this year. So all of those things are just part of the pie that gets part of the expense side. And then, of course, I will get to your hobby horse or you do, which is, you know, there are other obligations that the city is incurring. Again, from my presentation last week, roughly $98 million is being spent on outside agencies. If we didn't have to spend that money on the outside agencies, that makes up the entire gap range. So those are the type of things, when you combine them, of what you're incurring. Could you be more specific with the larger agencies that we spend money on on the outside so people understand that there is an institution that houses persons who are all charged with state charges, who are held until they go into the State Department of Corrections, but the city incurs the expenses for insurance and general operations. Could you talk about that expenditure? Yeah, and again, I want to be careful. I know, we have a consent decree, I understand. I'm not asking you to make an opinion, I'm just asking you to state the facts relative to the facts so that the public will know how much we spend on the Arlene's Justice Center, which is basically a state facility in terms of the charges that people are held on. There's essentially two different components to that, Council Member. One is roughly the 50-some million dollars that OJC, the jail, gets to run its ongoing operations. And then there's also roughly $25 million or so that the city pays for for healthcare at the jail. So if you look at that, $98,075,000 of it is for that. And then, of course, that includes criminal court, the DA, the public defenders, all of the other ones going down the list as part of that group. So it's a lot of our public safety providers, and of course, part of the pension system is part of that as well. So it's all of those things that in addition, but that expense for the jail and for the healthcare contract are both significant independently and then together significant as well. Could you also talk about loss of federal revenues? Well, look, obviously, the fact that the ARPA dollars have dried up are significant. Those were one-time funds that were used to replace revenue at the beginning and then used for significant other programming and to see how things were going to go. I think the hard part is when you have one-time revenue, it's good for either piloting something to see if it can go forward or to test, but when the money dries up, then it becomes much harder. And I'll cite Council Member Morrell, who frequently has lived through this when he was in the state legislature, and the bottom line is you can't consistently use money that you only get once for expenses that repeat over and over again. And as a result of all of that money going away, there are fewer options that we have. And then the last piece to that too, Council Member, is I think we all want to make sure that we have a robust surplus as well, right? Like we are not, and I think maybe Council Member Willard asked this last time, we are not tapping in to our surplus dollars in order to fund this budget. So we are sequestering that roughly $138 million to make sure that we actually have our own cash in the bank as necessary. Why do we need $138 million or any monies in reserve? There's a couple of reasons. First reason is in case something bad happens, particularly an act of God, really a hurricane for the city, that you need to be able to tap into your own dollars. And if all city services shut down, you couldn't collect property taxes and sales taxes and things were shuttered, then you need to have room. That's number one. Number two is if the funds were robust enough, and this is what the LLA talks about, you could use some of those excess dollars as prepayments for your federal and for other state programs, and then they pay you back, and that money goes back into there. And then the third point, which is an A and a B, is under GFOA principles, you wanna roughly have about 16% of your general fund in that surplus. We are, depending on which number you use, whether it's the $748 million or the $763 million, at 18.1 or 18.4%.

So we are now high. And again, B, I didn't go into this detail the other day, but when the ratings agencies look at the city of New Orleans, they are looking at a number of factors. And they are looking at, among other things, is your budget balanced? Do you have enough money in the bank? Are you at that 16% threshold or thereabout? And have you raised revenue for expenses to meet? Those are the things they're looking at. So as the city is both trying to improve its credit rating and, I think, also trying to raise its esteem to build more capital, it is important to show those things are happening in order to make sure we change. Look, I will tell you this. I've told this to the rating agencies. After this budget is passed, I'm gonna be like a cat scratching at their back door about, this is where we started at the beginning of the year, and we got dinged by two of the rating agencies held static by one of them because none of those things were in place. And all three have now changed, and therefore, I'm gonna actively pursue, on behalf of the city, trying to get that credit rating back up high. During the last 11 years, we incurred an expense that was somewhat unexpected. That was to build the third phase of the Orleans Justice Center. What was the amount that was involved with that, and from where did that money come? Council Member, I want to get back to you on the total. The issue there was it was delayed, and so as a result of the delay, the project increased exponentially over time. I know a significant portion came from FEMA funds. I think some came from capital, but I don't want to spit out a wrong number to you, but it is a sizable number. There were cuts that had to take place in certain areas relative to what our city council expenditures allow. Anytime you have to pay for one thing, other projects get delayed as well. Thank you. I know that you have a difficult job at this time. There's so many pressures on, whether it be the loss of federal government revenues, whether it be issues involving what we assume as a city in terms of responsibilities for the state, and the general pressures on us all, because we understand that people are incurring higher insurance costs and the like, but it's just important to recognize that in the last 11 years, we have not raised a millage that benefits the city of New Orleans general fund, but we've incurred hundreds of millions of dollars in additional costs. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any questions? Any more questions from the dais? If not, I do have one comment card from Maharry Morgan. Mr. Morgan. Yes. Mr. Larry Morgan. I couldn't read your handwriting. And just a reminder, everybody gets two minutes to speak. Just say your name and address and whether or not you are a paid actor. Good morning to the council. My name is Larry J. Morgan. I'm from the residence of 8312 Odeanda in the Caltrans District. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak upon the subject of the budget. The budget is making many people leave our city. I went to Slidell for a week. I went to some of the places and many other places. Look like all the people I met, they was from New Orleans. You're driving the people out of the city. Taxes must have its limitation. We must consider that the economy and the salary that the people get here today, we don't make that kind of money. And the saddest part about it is this. Joe, you gave yourself a six-figure raise, and you were the one that was talking after the election, fooling people, and how bad the crisis was in city government. Joe, you're a joke. And what I'd like you to know, all the time when y'all raise the taxes in Arlington, the service gets less and less and less. Please, consider. We cannot afford any more taxes because many people, their salary don't accommodate it, and the service is not rendered for the prices that we pay. Please, consider that. Thank you, Mr. Morgan. Councilmember Morrell. Thank you. Pardon my tardiness. I have two really quick questions. The first is I think it's important for all of us to acknowledge that when you're looking at millage increases, there are certain considerations that are beneficial to the city but don't directly impact the general fund. An example, Joe, I know that we have had conversations. Currently, it is the city's responsibility to fund the maintenance and upkeep of Crescent Park, correct, in the marinee? Correct. And one of the considerations, I know that we were in conversations with Audubon Park that maintains Waldenburg Park and the rest of the riverfront. They are one of the groups that receive millage dollars, and one of the considerations that's under consideration is that in exchange for rolling forward their millage, which is one of the smallest millages we have, that they would take over the maintenance of Crescent Park, which would mean that it would relieve the city of the obligation of doing so, and also they would do it cheaper, and also because of the fact they maintain the rest of the riverfront, it would have an economy of scale effect, correct? That's right. And, you know, Council Member, I think as a broader, Audubon is in almost every council district except for one, and they do a lot of work across the city. But to your direct point, what they have committed now is with this millage roll forward to take over the operation and the security at Crescent Park, which has been something that has been an unfunded mandate the city did not budget for, did not expect to take on this year. And, again, because their property is closer to this, they are better able to manage it with additional funds than the city ultimately. The other thing I wanted to put out there, I think there has been a lot of conversation about progressive versus regressive taxes, and I think it's important to define terminology.

A regressive tax is a tax that is, by being regressive in nature, it is a tax that's determined by tax authorities to fall disproportionately on the poor. And I can tell you as a former legislator, several former legislators, working with the Louisiana Budget Project, the most regressive tax in the city of New Orleans, in the state of Louisiana, is in fact sales tax, correct? Yes, it is. And though that is something that everyone has asked the city to consider, looking at ways we can manipulate or increase the sales tax, we have consistently taken that off the table because it is a regressive tax that would create additional tax burdens for very basic goods and services, correct? That's right. I mean, to your point, Councilmember, sales tax hits everybody evenly, right? So it doesn't matter if you make a million dollars or you're making at the poverty level $17,000. Every increment it goes up, it affects everybody the same, which means if you're poorer and you're trying to buy basic household goods, all of those increase as a result. Right. And similarly, with groups like the Louisiana Budget Project, they treat property tax as a non-regressive progressive tax because the amount of property tax you've paid is directly tied to the valuation of your property. So by definition, property tax increases along with the valuation, so therefore, the people paying the highest property tax are the people with the most expensive houses, correct? Yeah. I mean, Councilmember, just to that point, if your house is valued at $750,000, then your annual increase, again, if all the millages were to be rolled forward, is $513 on an annual basis. By contrast, if your house is valued at $250,000, then it's $141. So it's a huge difference of nearly $375 per year, depending on what kind of house you can afford. Okay. Thank you for that clarification. I appreciate it. Thank you. Councilmember King has a question. Yes. I want to make sure my point is, the council will be asking in the future about this millage to roll it forward, correct? Correct. So my question is, I want to make it very clear, my first question is, and you may have been asked this, CAO, I see members of the administration in the audience, what is the administration's position with the millage? On the millages? Yeah. The position has routinely been there's a series of choices, and either we can decide do we want to roll forward, and these are the things that will happen, or we don't roll forward and this is where we are. So that has been routinely our position. What would the administration prefer to see happen? Councilmember, I think we're going to listen to everybody and decide as we move forward what happens with that. Again, what we're saying is this is the cut that has happened, and as a result people have to decide what do they feel more comfortable with. If we propose all the cuts, then people complain you're cutting too much and you're not raising revenue. If we propose you're raising revenue, then people complain about the cuts. So it's about trying to find out where we want to land. Okay. So am I clear to hear that the administration has to have a yes or no answer when it comes to rolling the millage? As I've said repeatedly, we have a menu of options that we are presenting and we're going to let people decide. Okay. Is there someone in the audience who can answer that for the administration who can say yes or no? Because my question is if we're going to be asked to vote on this as a council, what help or what information are we going to be armed with or what help will we get from the administration if they want to see it move forward? I mean, Council Member, I think we've laid that forward pretty clearly already. I don't think it was laid forward because Mr. Morgan is one of the people saying don't vote for it. I'm hearing all kinds of people saying don't vote for it. I think the information isn't being plainly given to the people, all the facts. I don't think, matter of fact, I know it hasn't been laid out pretty plainly. I was in a barbershop last week, and I gave the information to the people. They had no idea of the actual numbers being presented. All they're hearing is my taxes are going to be raised after the sanitation fees have been raised. I'm not trying to sandbag anybody, but information is key. The more information we get out there to the people in the community, the better they can tell us as a council what their choices, what they want to see. But if we're doing a lackluster job as a whole, administration and the council, of getting information out, yeah, the people are going to say no because they don't have all the information. So my question is, my comment is, if the administration wants to see this roll forward, I strongly urge that they get with every council member and figure out which is the best way for that council and for that district to educate the constituents as much as possible. Yeah, well, council member, again, A, at everybody's request, we're going to post the information online about what the consequences would be if partial, incomplete, non-roll forward, or complete roll forward, as has been requested. The information is very much available about what the starting point is. And, of course, this conversation didn't start before now, and we've been actively involved. I've met with the council members pretty much every Tuesday for the year, except for the last month, and we'll continue to make sure we do that as well, so that way we hear your feedback and all of your colleagues' feedback in making sure that we understand what you're hearing when you're at your community meetings, when you're at your barbershop, when you're at the grocery store, so that way we can work together. And if there's information that isn't being provided or needs to be provided differently, how do we work together to make that happen? That's what I'm saying. I don't want this to be a back-and-forth conversation of adversarial.

I'm just letting you know what I'm hearing right now is no, and I think we can help that if we say, okay, we're going to add, we're going to get with our council members and say, here is all the information, the good, the bad, the ugly, so the community will understand exactly what's being presented. They can say yes or no to the council members, and we can have a better idea of what our constituents want. You may say the information is out there because it's online. I guarantee you a lot of people have no idea where that is, how to access that information online. So I don't know if just putting it online is the best. I think the best way to get the bumps, get the bruises, is to go directly to the voters and say this is what it is and this is what it isn't. So that's my comments on that. Yeah, and again, I would just reiterate that that was part of the purpose of having the community meetings, so we heard routinely from people about that. We can go back and forth, but the community meetings didn't work, all right? And I feel a bit disrespected every time I say something that's met with, yeah, I hear you, but I was at a barber shop last week, and the people had no idea the numbers being presented. All right, so I'm not trying to have this back and forth. My point is people don't know. There is a ton of misinformation out there that is making people very concerned, and they're letting me know. I'm like, hey, that's nowhere near what the information is. So the community meetings that I had at Berman, that I had at that year, You all had that Phyllis Wheatley that was all over the city. Clearly, it didn't work. So we need to find a better way. I'm happy to work with you anyway to make that happen, council. Council Member Willard. Thank you, Madam Chair. Joe, just to piggyback on Freddie's point, I don't think we can over-communicate something like this. So any additional communications, direct outreach, getting in front of church communities, stuff like that, I think goes a long way. But I think the main takeaway is, and you know where I stand on this right now on the roll forward, but the main takeaway is if we don't create any additional revenue, the cost is $77 million in cuts, right? Correct. And I think that's the main takeaway that we walk away with today. You know, there's $77 million in cuts. There's actually $100 million. $21.5 was boosted with one-time spending, which is not ideal, but we're trying to get through this year and next year. And so when you remove that, when you add in that $21.5 million, it's about $77 million in cuts. So I just wanted to put that out there. Yeah, and look, let me make sure I answer Council Member King's question in a better way. The conversation has begun, and that doesn't mean that is the ending point or doesn't need to be repeated, shouted from rooftops, big meetings, small meetings, of which the administration will be a part of, the council members will be a part of, and obviously we want to help that communication because to everybody's point, this is something that will be in the ether for the next five to six weeks. And so obviously there has been a beginning point of communication, and there needs to be continued communication. And along the way, if the council feels like there's ways for us to refine the communication as well, we want to do that. If you're saying this point is not seeping through or this is something you can explain better or did you think about running the math, we want to be your partner in making sure that we can do that so we provide what happens. The administration is a part of this, but obviously the council, particularly with no disrespect to the at-larges, the district council members, because they're the ones who are meeting regularly, like Council Member King, Harris, Green, Hughes, and McCarran with their constituents. So we want to be a part of refining that information and getting it to you and repeating it as necessary. And I think the last thing I would say, to put it a different way, if we had an additional $100 million in recurring revenues, we would be okay, we would be kumbaya. We would have $21.5 million to spend on one-time purposes for next year, but that's not where we are. There's really nothing we can do to come up with $100 million in recurring revenues right now. And so regardless of what revenue-producing measures we take, we're still going to be in a situation where we have to cut. So again, I really appreciate you and Mayor Moreno for being transparent through this entire process. And I agree, the conversation about a roll forward has begun. Yeah, I mean, look, and I'll say it one last time. It has begun. And if people don't feel like they're getting the information, then let's all work collectively on trying to get as much out there as humanly possible and continuing, because I think Council Member made another point about misinformation, how do we combat that as well? And let people make decisions, eyes wide open. That's what we're all about. Thank you. Wait, one more question. Hold on one second, hold on one second. I do want to just get my question in. We are, riffing off of what Council Member Willard said, we are at a $77 million deficit. If we rolled forward the millages, we would gain $42 million. We're still looking at a deficit of $35 million, right? Well, but I wouldn't say that, Council Member, because if you're looking at it, let's just take the number right here. So, again, if you say to Council Member Willard's point, the starting point was $99 million. We roughly have found $21 million. That gets you to $77 million. I have my calculator in front of me, so that way I don't make a basic math mistake here. And if just the millages on this page are rolled forward, it's roughly, then you've reduced it to $55 or $56 million. As I said before and repeat again, I would be shocked if the Council did not accept all the CAO-proposed cuts, which is roughly about $16 million.

So that gets you to $40 million. So, you know, those moves, if done, would potentially half, or more than half, actually. Right, but the bottom line is, even if we roll forward the millages, we're still looking at significant cuts from this budget, from your proposal. And again, I think that it's great that you all propose this, but I would like a scenario where the administration says, okay, well, the millages are rolled forward. This is what we would take off the table, because right now, everything's on the table, right? And so the proposal, the proposed cuts that we have here that were presented, if you could refine that, if the millages were rolled forward, I think that would be helpful for all of us, especially as we're communicating to our constituents. Understood. Council Member Murrell. I think I have a bit of a different perspective. I think that if the Council, at this point, rolls millages forward, I think that we would be in a position to dictate to you which cuts come off the table. I do think it's a cooperative relationship, but at the end of the day, I don't expect the administration and Council to agree necessarily on which of those items are the priorities to restore. I think that we'll come to an agreement, but I think that already, when I talk to my colleagues, there is consensus on some issues that need to be restored and not consensus on others, and it's going to be a cooperative public conversation. So, I mean, though I certainly would love to see what is your priority as an administration as far as those restorations, I would tell the public that whatever you think that you want to restore, the Council's ultimately going to have the final say because the Council ultimately passes the budget, which you know from our last administration, there was multiple times that the Budget Committee and you did not agree with what the Cantrell administration wanted to restore, and that was part of the process. And even though our relationship with this administration is certainly a bit more respective, I don't expect there to be a one-for-one agreement on any of that. What I would also add is that a general comment to the public and my 10-year-old corrected me, money does come from paper, which does come from trees, but we can't print it. So, something that I said at a function last week regarding the budget is that for multiple years when we've had these conversations, there's kind of been a general conversation between the public and the Council as don't cut my thing, fund my thing. And though we certainly want to hear that, and that was part of the conversation at the Mayor's Town Hall meetings, what I would put to the public is also, what do you want cut? Because at the end of the day, there is a fixed amount of money that we have available to us, and if we are going to fund something that is uncut without raising millages, we have to cut something else. I know, for example, tomorrow we're going to receive a tremendous amount of information from the NOPD that they want a heck of a lot more money. And I will tell you what I intend to tell them tomorrow, which is, okay, NOPD, what do you want to cut? Because as any department, as any individual in the public who wants to restore these cuts without a millage roll forward, it is going to require a cut somewhere else. There is no printed money that we have available to us, and so as we go into, also, the other budget presentations for today, as we hear advocates advocating for which departments to spare, part of the benefit of having a very significant and large briefing book available to the public is that you see how much things cost. You see how much we're spending on positions, on programs. There is nothing that prevents anyone from coming up here, and there will be plenty of people that come here tomorrow advocating for cutting NOPD. Go read the briefing book, tell me what you want to cut, and tell me how much money that generates and what your position as a layperson in the public, what cuts you want to restore, because that is the budget process. It's not just about coming to the kitchen table and saying, mom and dad, I want to restore the streaming services. Mom and dad are going to say, okay, who's paying for that? And that's kind of where we're at, and I would hope this year versus previous years, because there is a level of transparency as far as what things cost. Do not just come advocating for restoration and against millages if you don't have a proposed cut that you're also going to advocate for, because that is not helpful. And Council Member, if I could complete that thought too, and this is a little bit, I think, what Council Member King was getting at as well, there's also, we are talking all about general fund money too and part of, I feel like, some of the inaccurate information I've seen is there is still non-general fund money that's going to many programs as well, and so when people talk about the cuts, they are focused on the general fund side, but there's still almost an equal amount on non-general fund funding as well that also everybody needs to keep their eye on as a complete picture. All right, I have one speaker card from Mr. Adun. Good morning. Also, everyone say Agunike Adun, Apple Street. I just wanted to add to the record for you, Mr. Morrell, in regards to the regressive tax. When the austerity crisis was announced in the beginning of the year, Superintendent Ann Kirkpatrick said that there wouldn't be an incentive to penalize the citizens with civil penalties, and I just want to emphasize the, emphasize that we don't, like, miss the forest for the trees, because while poor people are being regressively taxed, also what happens, especially in black communities, especially in New Orleans East, people get fined. Unsparking tickets, code enforcement, all of that ramps up and it hits poor people as well. So, just wanted to make sure that was on your radar and add completion to your statement.

Thank you. Thank you. The board is clear. Ashley, you wanna get to the next item? Yes, ma'am. The next item is the Department of Finance presented by our Deputy Mayor and CEO. Accounting is up first. And after accounting, we'll have purchasing. Gonna all do it together? Wonderful. Accounting, purchasing, revenue, treasury, and retirement all together. There's a lot of talent and experience at that table. There it is. Ready to go? Y'all ready? We're ready. Okay. Y'all ready? All right. All right, good morning, council members. Today, I'm pleased to present the Department of Finance proposed 2027 budget. Before I get started, I'd like to introduce the finance leadership team who will be presenting with me today. To my right, I've got Freda Richardson, Deputy Director and Comptroller. Next to her is Kai Wells, Interim Chief Procurement Officer. Then I've got Romy Samuel, Collector of Revenue. We have Mr. Jesse Evans, Director of the City of New Orleans Employee Retirement System. And then finally, Ms. Courtney Wilson-Renthrop, Treasurer. Yes. Each of our bureau chiefs play a critical role in the city's overall financial management. And today, they'll each have an opportunity to walk you through their respective areas, including their proposed 2027 budget, the efficiencies they've implemented, and the priorities for the coming year. I'll begin with the agency-level overview, and then I'll turn it over to each of them to provide the details for their bureaus. The overarching theme for 2027 is continuing to strengthen the city's financial management while being disciplined about how we use our resources. We have worked throughout 2026 to improve processes, leverage technology, and focus our staffing and expenditures on activities that directly support the city's financial operations. Before you, we have the agency-level overview, the agency-level proposed 2027 budget for the general fund. Approximately $38.7 million compared to the $19.3 million in the 2026 adopted budget. The primary driver of that increase, CAO Juriso mentioned earlier, is the debt service that was not budgeted in our general fund last year. Also, it includes $18.2 million in principal payments and $2.3 million in interest expense that's reflected in our current 2027 operating budget. When we remove the debt service and compare the operating components on an apples-to-apples basis, the agency is proposing a budget of approximately $1 million less than 2026. As you hear from each bureau today, you'll see that the underlying approach has been one of careful resource management and targeted investment. Several bureaus will actually be operating with fewer positions in 2027 than in 2026, while others are holding at capacity because we believe there is a direct opportunity in revenue generation and compliance. Now, we'll turn it over and address the key components of each department. And I'll start with the director's office. In the general fund for the director's office, we have currently five full-time equivalents, and we also are responsible for our financial and supply management software of about $650,000, sorry, our BRAS software. And new for this year, we will be responsible for the budget for the Board of Review tax appeals consultant of about $800,000, and also the audits for the city and the retirement systems of about $850,000. Next up, we have accounting. Good morning. For 2027, for our personnel, we will reduce from 2022 FTEs that we have currently to 20 in 2027, which is a 9% reduction. We are removing the assistant payroll supervisor vacancy, and also an accounts payable office worker vacancy is being removed. Also, for other operating, for ADP, we are coming in for $3 million for our ADP, which is payroll and timekeeping software. This includes a proposed reduction that we've already received from ADP of $250,000 for 2027 for maintenance and an additional 50K of investments. Good morning. From purchasing, as it relates to personnel, we're at 6.5 FTEs in 2027, which is a reduction of three FTEs from 2026, when we were at 9.5. With regards to our other operating, we have our brass commodity code maintenance, as well as our hearing officer for our administrative hearing officer for disqualification hearings. Good morning. For retirement, our budget's made primarily for personnel. That's primarily what drives our budget. Seven and a half full-time equivalents is what we're requiring for 2027. Those seven and a half employees play a vital role in safeguarding the financial well-being of over 3,000 active employees and over 2,000 retirees. We're also the accountants and the custodian for the $621 million investment portfolio for the fund. From that fund, we pay roughly $4.3 million each month in retirement benefits. This underscores our commitment to timely, reliable financial support for those who serve the city. We do have one planned retirement in our personnel area for the year. It'll be roughly a mid-year retirement. And then, as relates to our other operating, we basically are gonna go with the basic operating needs of an office. We did have a planned construction with some enhancements for the actual office. We're gonna push those back to our future budget. Next, we have revenue. Good morning. The Bureau of Revenue is going into 2027 with 46 employees. We were able to double the audit staff, the sales tax audit team, which is definitely revenue-generating. We will have more reach in the audit areas, so we'll be able to conduct more audits there. A project manager position, which was a contractor, has been cut, and we have brought that task in-house. One of our internal staff will handle that. Our other operating expenditures, we do have upkeep and maintenance for our sales tax revenue system, the collection system of 1.1 million. We do have some cuts. Some printing costs have been reduced. More people are filing online, so we don't require printing sales tax forms for those, which is a plus.

We have some outside consultants, storage of legacy data from the prior sales tax system we were able to cut, and a one-time expenditure with the clerk of court for filing of liens. Good morning. For Treasury, we have a reduction, consists of 20 FTEs, a reduction of three FTEs from 2026, which includes positions in our cash-sharing, AVT, and break-tag units within the department. We also have other operating costs, INOVA cash-sharing system, which is a citywide system of 215,000. We have our IAS World Tax Administration Platform SAS and maintenance fees. That is 350,000. Printing costs, which we have reduced, but it is at 210. We have banking and analysis fees of 190,000, and we also have a reduction in our contract labor. And that concludes our general fund budget key points. Here on this slide shows our non-general fund budget, and as you can see, for 2027, we are proposing zero non-general fund. That is a difference of moving the debt service in this non-general fund over to general fund for 2027. In the next few slides, we're going to talk about our efficiencies and goals for each bureau, so I'll let them have an opportunity to discuss that. Thank you for accounting. For 2026, we did complete our 2025 audit on time, and this was the first year ever that the LLA approved and issued our audit in one business day after submittal, which was on July 1st, 2026. We have. increase the efficient monthly production of our financial statements that are inclusive of enhanced analysis for the City Council, Mayor and CAO. We have weekly reconciliations of bank accounts to move general fund dollars for weekly expenses of payroll, fringes, and vendor payments and we want to thank the departments internal who are helping us in this effort because we could not do it without them ensuring that they have this information and brass timely so that we can reconcile. Efficient fund balance reconciliations by creating LAMP investment bank accounts for about 60 percent of our special revenue funds and also creating the do to do from journal entries between general fund and special revenue funds to ensure accuracy of reporting so that's ensuring that those special revenue funds do have the representative of the cash that's for the fund balance for those special revenues within their segregated bank accounts at LAMP. We also have an object cleanup that we are completing by the end of the year and that's also to ensure that duplicate objects are deactivated and creating a glossary of terms of active objects to increase our universal efficiencies across all departments and also we have brass updates to assist vendors and departments in conducting business with CL in a more efficient manner. We've already done this year the account categories established for expenditures, ties to special events, vendor notification of canceled and rejected invoices. Before the departments nor the vendors knew that we canceled or rejected invoices they now can see that on a platform they get an email they know exactly what it is why it was canceled and what they need to do to get that invoice resubmitted so it can be paid and lastly initiating monthly closing of our cash payables, purchasing requisitions, source management assets and global ledger modules and grants. For purchasing we were able to successfully host our annual procurement fair while spending a third of our allotted budget and we also assisted with analysis on contract consolidation to find areas for citywide savings. For retirement we heard a lot about communication I think in the prior session. We think communication is very very important as it relates to retirees. One of the things that we launched was a text messaging system called Nomers Now. It allows us to communicate with our retirees via text messages give important announcements about things that are happening with retirement so that's been very successful. We allow members to actually sign up for that. It's actually a wet signature that's required. We don't just do that online they have to actually physically sign up for that. Again another way to effectively communicate with our retiree community. We also are utilizing our monthly direct deposit statement so retirees get their benefit payments each month and there's a statement that goes out that indicates that a direct deposit has actually been made. We're now including notices within those direct deposits as opposed to doing separate mailings so that again cuts down on the cost of doing separate mailing. We include those direct those notices within the direct deposit statements. We were managing our budget just for the basic basic office needs and again as I mentioned before we postponed a office construction enhancement. We're going to push that back to a future budget. Next we have revenue. Thank you. Revenue is leveraging technology to maximize collections by streamlining compliance processes. What that means the new tax system enables the revenue department to communicate within the unit, the bureau. The delinquent tax unit can get audit leads to audit sooner. They are generating leads on their dashboards daily so they can actually make those recommendations a lot sooner. We've identified over $250,000 in printing cost reductions as mentioned before. We do not and will not have to print paper forms because people are using the online platforms more often to file sales taxes. We did not backfill the project manager position as support for the sales tax system or nor did we fill the dot net developer contract position. We've increased the number of audits with the addition of internal sales tax audit staff. To date we're on pace to complete approximately 200 by year's end. Collections so far have been $3.3 million in sales tax as of August 2026 and the current return on investment for our audit team is 4.6 to 1.

For the Bureau of Treasury we've established a process to refer delinquent accounts particularly delinquent business personal property accounts to the Office of Debt Recovery. Increasing accountability and pursuing additional revenue opportunities. We've also launched a comprehensive cash management initiative to improve the monitoring collection recordation and forecast of available cash. In working in lockstep with the Bureau of Accounting and other departments within the city we've implemented routine transfers to appropriate bank accounts to ensure cash is aligned with the individual fund needs. We've also strengthened the coordination between revenue collections, our cash availability and expenditure requirements. Improving the city's ability to forecast and strategically manage available cash to meet our operational needs. We will now move to our 2027 goals. For accounting we will complete the fiscal year 2026 annual financial audit and issue the act for by June 30th with timely resolution of audit findings and required management responses. Provide timely accurate and analytical financial reporting to the mayor city council and CAO to support effective financial management and decision making. Maintain our weekly bank reconciliations and cash transfers to ensure that the general fund cash is accurately positioned to meet weekly payroll, fringe benefit and vendor payment obligations. Strengthen our special revenue accounting and reporting by establishing dedicated LAMP investment accounts for at least 90 percent of special revenue funds and implementing standardized due to due firm accounting procedures to ensure accurate inter-fund balances and timely fund balance reconciliations. And finally our monthly closing of our cash payables, purchasing requisitions, source management assets and global ledger modules and grants. For purchasing our 2027 goals are to participate in the monthly closing of brass to aid in the finalizing of transactions monthly and the production of reliable financial records. Continue to participate in vendor outreach events such as those hosted by Propeller in an effort to educate external stakeholders on how to do business with the city, specifically how to find and respond to opportunities and facilitate procurement training for internal stakeholders on the procurement policy manual and standard operating procedures through quarterly virtual trainings and workshops. The 2027 goals for retirement are, these are pretty standard, first two anyway, we want to attain an unqualified audit opinion for the 2026 audit year. We submit our audit of course to the city but it will also submit our audit directly to the legislative auditor as well. So again our goal is to have an unqualified audit opinion for 2026 audit, for the audit year. Secondly we want to attain the certificate of excellence for public pension plan reporting and transparency as took granted by the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems. This indicates our ability to or our forthness to be transparent with how we operate and how we handle our financial obligations. We want to continue member education up to and including a three-hour quarterly retirement classes offered via civil service. A member of my staff actually teaches that class and we offer it quarterly. It's a three-hour class. Lastly we want to continue the formalizing our plans for future operation and stamping. As I look across the landscape of the retirement office, roughly 70 percent of the office will be eligible to retire in January of next year. That being said, we really need to focus on a formalized plan on how we're going to operate in the future. Next we have revenue. Thanks Jesse. Revenue's 2027 goals. We want to continue development in our current sales tax system. There are things we're learning every day. Functionality that we can use. We want to grow our audit program and we will use the system to do that to identify those leads that we can pursue and recover those revenues. In addition we want to broaden our revenue, our resources leveraging relationships with banking institutions through ODR. Through Office of Debt Recovery. We also want to maximize recovery utilizing the existing city code. We currently have tools where we can recover outstanding liabilities, sales tax liabilities, utilizing warrants for distraint levies, things like that as well as liens. I'll take this time to do a public service announcement. We are having an amnesty program that is beginning October 1st going through the end of the year, December 31st, where taxpayers who have not filed can get a waiver of 100% of penalties and 50% of interest on sales taxes that are unpaid. So we will have opportunities to pay over time an abbreviated installment agreement and we urge taxpayers, business owners to come out and participate. Our 2027 goals for the Bureau of Treasury to successfully onboard our new tax sale vendor GovEase as the city's new tax link auction vendor to strengthen tax collection. Leverage some of our technologies such as I.S. World Billing and Receivable System to maximize the staff's capacity especially where there is area of limited staffing. Strengthen cross-functional communication and data sharing between city departments and the Orleans Parish Assessor's Office to improve the accuracy and data validation of the business personal property tax bills in particular and improve our coordination between departments for projected revenue cash availability in the city's upcoming funding requirements. And that completes our presentation. Let us know if you have any questions. We do. I'll go first and then I know Council Member King and Willard have some questions. Really quickly, the Director's Office personnel notes five full-time employees in 2020. seven, but the budget book says six, what is accurate? I only know five.

Okay, so the budget book is not accurate in this? Unless, do we include Frida in the director's office? Okay, so Frida, and then two of our IT staff, and then the assistant, and then chief of staff. Okay. Equals six. Okay, so six is the accurate number. Yes. And just generally for the public and my colleagues, there are some variances between the presentations and the budget books, so look out for that as we go. Sales tax, Romy, we can pay online now, right? Absolutely. Okay, good. And then on the audit staff positions, you said you have a 4.6 to 1 return on investment. Correct. What can we anticipate going forward in 2027 with the additional staffers? Well, we have five now. There are no additional team members, but there is an opportunity there, because it is proven that we can bring in revenues. And we can generate revenues using these staff members? Absolutely. Great. And then on the Gov E's, is that the replacement for CivicSource? Yes. And what's the implementation schedule? Within the next six months. In the meantime, are we doing tax sales? What are we doing? No, currently, no. So we're just holding on tax sales until we can get this implemented? Yes. That's the larger conversation that we need to have, because I think we can get some revenue there that is unrecognized. Is there a timeline on getting this implemented quicker than six months? We would like to. We're currently working on the 27 property tax bill, so that's somewhat of the reason why there is a delay with the onboarding. Okay. Again, I'd like to have a larger conversation about that, because it seems like that horizon is not as quick as it should be. Council Member Willard. Thank you, Madam Chair. On the sales tax audits, have you all done any modeling on when you get to a point of diminishing returns? Like if you add two more team members, you bring in more money, but then if you get up to 10, you're duplicating efforts and no additional money comes in? Well, the reach, I mean, I'll be honest, when I started, it was 25 auditors. So, and we still were not able to reach all the registered businesses. We may audit maybe 2 to 5 percent of registered businesses. So, the more staff we have, the more reach we have. Now, we do have contract auditors. We have two firms right now that help assist, but we've seen that the return is higher with internal staff. So, we're at 10 now. I think, you know, that's an opportunity for revenue growth if we add more team members. Have you guys had any conversations with the Department of Revenue, because they do sales tax audits in the city as well? Absolutely. We do joint audits. We do. We've done, yes. Okay, cool. All right. I'm going to start over, because I kind of went through my questions slide by slide. Alyssa, you know, one of the big things for, one of the big reasons for the increase is because of the debt service that we're now budgeting for. Can you just kind of overview all of the types of debt service that we're including in this portion? Is that all of the city's debt service? That's the debt service that we are directly responsible for. So, that includes the, I think there's about five? Yes. Five bonds that are our responsibility, not the Board of Liquidation's responsibility. Okay. On the personnel side, I was confused as well. Sorry. Five versus six. I'd have to recalculate the number, but I was basically trying to do an analysis of, you know, salary plus benefits for employees in finance versus accounting, and it seemed like finance was a little bit heavier than accounting, but I don't know how it reconstitutes when you put the six in, so it may level out altogether. Moving on to purchasing, we have 6.5 FTEs for next year budgeted. I wanted to know if that includes the Chief Procurement Officer position. Yes, it does. It does? Okay. And any, can we get any type of update right now as to how that search is going? So, the search is basically started, I think, about a week or so ago, two weeks ago it got posted online. I've also started doing some of my own recruiting. I put it on LinkedIn in hopes of generating some more. I'm waiting to hear back. I've heard about a few people have already, we've got a few people who have already applied, but I haven't seen the list yet of how many applicants we've got thus far. Okay. One of the reasons I'm asking about that is because we recently updated the Responsible Contracting Ordinance, authorizing the Bureau of Purchasing to conduct those responsibility hearings to determine whether contracts are doing responsible work or non-responsible work, and if they're doing non-responsible work, to hold them accountable, make sure they're not getting awarded with contract after contract. And I think my team connected with you this morning, Alyssa, about that 10,000 that was removed? Yes. Yeah, so we had it in our original budget, but as you might have heard from CAO Giubarri, so we're planning to have a menu of options, and whether or not that fits in, or that was taken out, maybe we'll find something else to remove to add that in, because I do see the importance of that line item. Yeah, for that hearing officer, and again, could be a potential revenue-producing measure, at least until we get all responsible contractors working on City of New Orleans construction sites. The next thing I'll go on to is, under revenue, I wanted to know about the I3 verticals and the Chase handheld device purchase maintenance. Can somebody touch on that? Yes, so I3 verticals is a vendor who is storing our legacy data, sales tax information from the prior system. When we do audits, we audit three years plus the current year, so we need to be able to research older data that we had not brought over into the new system. So we had to have that system stood up for a couple years while we, you know, keep adding, going forward. The I3 verticals? Correct. The handhelds are for when we go collect from special events.

That is a payment mechanism, like Toast, you know, similar to a Toast or a Square, where we can go and collect on-site at those special events. So is I3 vertical going to be phased out? Yes. At what point? 27. Okay, okay, good. $385,000 for outside consultants? Correct. Can you touch on that? So we do, with our current system, it is a requirement that we maintain on-site their developers, because the core product cannot be accessed through outside developers. So we have to maintain their staff, but it was cheaper to add our team as well. So we kept the minimum number of their team, which is the Fast Enterprises team, but we were able to hire .NET developers at a much lower cost as contractors to the city to do some of the work. So it's cheaper to do it that way? Correct. What about 22nd Century? What services are they providing? Well, that was, the city developers were hired through 22nd. Got it. Other operating $32,000 one-time expense to the clerk of court? Correct. So when we escalate enforcement after sales tax audits, if we do installment agreements, we have to file liens with the courts. So there's a cost to filing those liens, and as we ramp up enforcement, the cost goes up. So we want to make sure we're paying the courts so that we're able to still do that. That's expected to be enough to cover it for next year? Yes. Okay. Moving on to Treasury, $548,000 for Tyler Technology and INOVA annual fees. Courtney, what are those? Yes. So the INOVA cash-earning system, that's basically a cash-earning system throughout different departments within the city for taxpayers to come in and make payments in-house. IAS World is basically our billing and receivable system, so the tax bills that you receive are generated through that system. We have taxes, as well as code enforcement, and other departments utilize the IAS World system to put liens and taxes on the bills. Okay. Echo Councilmember Harris's point on tax sales for adjudicated properties in the city. I mean, obviously, we're in a cash crunch. Anything we can do to come up with money is a good step in the right direction, but I understand we're onboarding a new vendor, but as soon as we can do that, that would help all of us. I wanted to touch on business personal property because you had some information on that. Is that reported directly from the businesses themselves? Is that self-reported? Yes. The businesses are supposed to submit a Lab 5 to the Orleans Parish Assessor's Office, and from there, we receive that data to generate the bills. Is there anything to make sure that information is being reported accurately, or do you know? Well, as far as Treasury, if they come into our office, we would direct them to the Assessor's Office, but it's imperative that businesses are communicating to the city and the Assessor open and closed dates, as well as ensuring that they're submitting those Lab 5s annually. And then I saw in the slides, increased communication, improved communication with the Assessor's Office, so I think that's another good step in the right direction, but thank all of you for your time today. Council Member Murrell. Thank you. A couple of quick questions. I don't think I have that many. Mr. Willard already touched on the fact that we are now budgeting for debt service in the general fund. I did think that it might be worth explaining the, it might be worth explaining slide one and slide six, slide eight, where it is, we are budgeting now from the general fund for debt service, but we are removing from the non-general fund debt service previously. So explain why we are doing that procedurally, because I think that if someone is watching us at home, they're like, well, are we robbing Peter to pay Paul, or what is the economy of doing this? Yeah, I think the overall approach there is that this is truly owed by the general fund and using the general fund sources of cash. And so by putting it in a non-general fund, to me it's kind of like it wasn't presented accurately, because we didn't have another source of cash to pay for that debt service. Right. I think that's an important distinction to make, because the reality is that when you have debt service, it's a reoccurring cost that requires reoccurring revenue to be identified to pay it, and by putting it in non-general fund, it is kind of a budget gimmick to try and present that it is not a reoccurring cost, and therefore it's eligible for other sources of funding. So I am heartened, and I appreciate y'all doing it that way, because though it certainly makes our life a bit more difficult in that we have to have it compete with other reoccurring expenses, it is the honest way to do it, because at the end of the day, if we don't account for it properly, then we run the risk of pretending that that money is eligible in the general fund when it is actually accounted for. So I appreciate y'all doing that. With ADP, the ADP, the ADP, because I think it's on page two, just so everyone's aware, the payroll system that you guys implement is used by all departments, correct? So ADP, which you're paying for, the same ADP that NOPD uses, every single department in the city uses, correct? That's correct. Okay. I just, I think it's important because we're going to see throughout these budget presentations, there are costs that are allocated to one department that are actually a cost of all departments. Yes. Like the audits, for example, previously the audits were housed in the New Orleans City Council in our budget, though there are costs that the whole city bears. And so part of the reason why that's now in your budget is because if it's an audit issue, it just made sense procedurally to put it with the group that does the audits. So I wanted to account for that. Budgeting for retirement. I see that on page three, you guys are budgeting for, I believe it is one person that's leaving mid-year? Yes. We have one person who's retiring mid-year.

So just for those of you who are watching, the thousands or the millions who are watching at home, part of that process we're trying to do in all departments is we have to budget for a terminal leave for those people who are leaving at some point. Previously, we did not budget for it, though it occurs. So as a department, you guys are talking to the people who are eligible for retirement and trying to figure out when they're going to retire so that you can budget for it, correct? Correct. I mean, that's what we're doing specifically here within our office, but I think that should be something that departments should do across the board. Right, because if a person in any department decides to leave and they separate from the city and they have obligations that he has to pay, that comes out the budget regardless, correct? It does, yes. So when you don't budget for terminal leave, it just creates a mid-year budget deficit if you have multiple people leaving. Correct. And just to be clear, they do have the option to get the actual cash payout, but they could also apply to additional credible service, which would give them a higher pension. So it's their choice. I can apply for additional credible service, higher pension, or I can take the cash. Well, we know from a lot of reporting that we have many people who chose the cash. So I applaud y'all for using that as a practice. I hope other departments are paying attention because, as I said previously, there's no money tree. So if you're a department and you go and you do not account for terminal leave, I think something that's incumbent upon the council is that as we're looking at mid-year cuts, the idea is that if you are a department that did not account for a terminal leave and many people leave, there's this idea we're going to find that money somewhere. I would encourage all departments to hear me now, that comes from your budget. So if you have people that leave and you don't account for it, we're not going to go to the money tree out back to get the money. We're going to have to relook at your own budget and you're going to have to live within your means. So if their department's not accounting for terminal leave right now, I would encourage you to do it because it's much more awkward when you have many people leave and then suddenly you don't have print paper, you don't have water, you don't have whatever the things you thought you had in your budget previously. So I appreciate y'all doing that. Retirement. Retirement. So I think there are two slides, there's one on 11 and one on 16. I appreciate that y'all are doing some efficiencies like text messages and reducing overhead. Who is responsible for the termination of COLAs for retirees? Is that also within your department? It's within the board's discretion. Okay. Because I know that we did some changes a couple of years ago that make COLAs feasible. Is there any effort to budget for a potential COLA for 2027? We not for 2027. There will be a one-time COLA. We do a one-time COLA like every year. But yeah. It's only a flat 500. We actually have our actual, we're looking at what a 1% increase when we say COLA, an increase in the actual monthly benefit. Right. We're looking at both a one-time and a 5% COLA. It's not in this year's budget. Okay. But we will actually be looking at it at its October meeting. We'll have those numbers put forth. The last time we looked at it, it was north of $20 million to do a 1% COLA. They're very expensive because it is the gift that keeps on giving. Once you promise that 1% increase, there's no taking it back. Again, it's the gift that continues to give. So to answer your question more directly, we are looking at it, but it will not be in the 2027 budget. At the earliest, it will be in the 2028. Right. So right now, what, so you're accounting for a one-time, not for a permanent COLA increase? That's correct. Okay. One-time paid in February. Okay. So you're watching the one-time. I think we started that two years ago, maybe? Two years ago. Two years ago. So the one-time that we have given retirees, we do it every December. We try to do it around Christmas, right, when we do it? We look at what the end of the year, we've now, since the council has been gracious enough to move it forward, it's every February now. Okay. Every February. So we're budgeting for the one-time that will continue, and we're looking at feasibility in 2028 of doing an actual real COLA. Correct. 1% and a 5%. Okay. Let's see. What else I had? Oh, I think, oh, also page 12, we talked about the audits. I want to also give kudos to the fact that audits are continuing to go up. I know that at one point, as we're coming out of the pandemic and the like, audits were down significantly. We're up now to 200. As Council Member Harris said, and as you said, Romy, I think that anything we can do to hire more auditors, we should be doing, because the ROI is 4.6 to 1. So I will readily support any effort to hire as many auditors as possible, because as you said, no matter how many auditors we hire, they're not enough. And there are plenty of individuals, I know that we have even begun to hear from people with amnesty. They're going, whoa, wait a second. I look back on my books, I really need to get straight with my sales tax audits. I think anything that we can do as a council, if you identify any mechanism to hire more auditors, we will work with you diligently to hire as many as you can fill in those seats, because that is a direct revenue increase to the city. And that's all I have. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member McCarran. Thank you. Thank you all for your presentation. I want to ask this for every department. Can you guys provide us with an org chart of your department? And I'm going to ask the CAO from here on out if other departments can also present us with an org chart, so we can kind of see.

You don't have to put names of people that are on there, just like filled, vacant, whatever would be helpful for us to kind of understand how each department runs. I just have a couple additional questions. Some of these positions, so the FTEs, the reduction, are these positions being reduced? Are they currently vacant? Okay, they're vacant. To Council Member Morrell's point about sales tax audits, I think if there's people that are already in your department that could maybe be cross-trained as well. I don't know if that's something that you all have thought about, but just a suggestion of how you can, FTEs, and if we're having trouble hiring, that anybody can be cross-trained on that. I don't know. Well, there is a cross-training between accountants and auditors. You have to have so many hours in accounting in order to qualify for the position. So I don't think there's any way, well, I'm afraid it's going to give up in accounting, but. Not hardly. I would say we have a shortage of accountants. The staff that are not, the vacancies that you're seeing that are not being filled are more of our management development series or assistant office workers. Okay. And what is the role of the project manager? I know you said that was something you guys originally were doing out of the house, but now you brought it in-house. What is that person, what is their role? Well, they manage the development, the additional development we're doing with the system, the expansion of the sales tax collection system. We're learning as we go. We have monthly meetings with municipalities across the country who are using this application, and we see what is available there that we can use here. So as those different modules grow, we need a point person to kind of make sure those are moving in in the right direction. So we brought that in-house. Okay. Perfect. I saw in revenue, there's one person that is funded by a short-term rental fund. Is that, what does that person do? And then are there other people that are working on short-term rentals, whether it's payment or enforcement, whatever? I know that mostly lives in safety and permits, but you guys do process things. Is there anybody else that you can get on that, because that's a revenue stream and we're about to increase those nightly fees to create more revenue there? Absolutely. Because we have short-term rentals that report on platforms and individually, we make sure that the individuals who are reporting, support timely. So we have an analyst, a revenue field agent who monitors those to make sure that those filings are timely and if not they go out and make contact with those taxpayers. We do have several support staff as well as I thought an auditor that does the same thing that is funded but I defer to Ms. DeLarge on that. But we monitor the program outside of the platform filings. There are individuals who do their own filings. If there's additional people that are working on the short term rental stuff then I would encourage you all to just take a look at that and make sure that we are capturing using that funding stream. That's what it's for and that can kind of alleviate some general fund money for other employees or whatever y'all need. But let's I think during this process of after hearings and going for the amendment let's make sure that we're capturing that because that is what it's supposed to be used for too. So I think that was everything for me. Thank you. Council Member Green. Good morning and thank you for your presentation. It's good to see you all there. I have a simple question that was the result of a statement that was made that two to five percent of the businesses get audited. I want to make sure that businesses out there don't think that they have a 95 percent chance of not being audited. Correct. Could you explain that statistic because we don't audit every business. We do not. Could you explain that so that folks understand? So every year we develop an audit plan. We make sure that we have a healthy mix of all industries included but we may focus on a particular industry. It may be one year it may be construction. The others may be retail, restaurants, bars, hotels, the like. So what we do though, each auditor has in their inventory a mix of audits. Because each audit is different you learn different industries by performing those reviews. Now, when we're in audit assignments we do generate leads. So if we find that taxpayers are doing business with unregistered businesses we will pursue those and we follow through on those because we have firsthand information to perform a review. So what we say is we also conduct many audits or desk audits. Our normal audit review is three years plus the current year which can take some time. We have scaled back on auditing that longer period of time so that we can do more audits and make sure that businesses are in compliance. What we want to make sure is that businesses are applying the tax law properly. It's not necessarily, you know, it's the gotcha moment. We want to make sure, especially for the newer businesses because we try to get to new businesses within the first six months so that they understand what the city's expectations are as it relates to sales tax regulations so that we put them on the proper path. We don't want to wait two, three years down the line and they've been reporting incorrectly and then penalize them. So we try to reach, you know, with the many audits because it's a condensed period because they haven't been operating for a longer period of time. So we try to reach out to newer businesses, more seasoned businesses. Those take longer because they've been in business longer. The longer, the larger operations like hotels, major restaurant chains, those will take a longer period of time. But we try to do a healthy mix of all.

It's important to understand for businesses that when you don't do the sales taxes correctly, you can run afoul not only of the city but also of the state. With the state, correct. And the state has its auditors. In other words, I guess what I'm trying to emphasize to businesses is to utilize the services, even to call in and ask if they need some help relative to how to do correct sales tax applications. And we have, you know, customer service representatives on the first floor of City Hall. We are open Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. Taxpayers walk in all the time. We do not complete the returns for you, but we will walk you through it and explain to you exactly what numbers need to go where. So, you know, we welcome taxpayers. I think last year, a year before, it was 14,000 walk-ins for the year. So taxpayers do come in and sit with us. And we urge taxpayers who do not understand to come in and we'll explain it to you. Thank you. What are the repercussions for collecting sales taxes and not submitting them to the government agency, which is the city? So we do levy penalties and interest, as well as negligence fees, if you don't file within 60 days of the due date. The penalties are 5% per month, which is capped at 25% per month after that fifth month, and 1.25% in interest. That does not cap. So for as long as you keep the city's revenue, we will charge you for that. In the amnesty period, we are waiving the penalty. We do expect 100% of the tax dollars to come in and 50% of the interest. Just like any bank, if you borrow money, you have to pay the interest on it. But we're discounting the interest by 50% and waiving the penalty and negligence fees 100%. I want to encourage our business owners who collect sales taxes or which collect sales taxes to stop in the city hall and find out the facts relative to what you have to do. Too many times we have businesses that go out of business and they say, I owe the city thousands of dollars in taxes. Well, it could have been resolved earlier if you just walked into city hall. We're a small city. From wherever you are in the city of New Orleans, it takes you less than a half hour to get into city hall. We welcome you to come in and speak to someone in our various offices, the Bureau of Revenue, the Department of Finance, and others. If there's no one who can give you that help, I'm not going to say that. You can always give them the help. No excuses. You walk in. You're going to get information that's going to help your business out. Thank you very much. We do have it online. We have the frequently asked questions. We have a brochure that we emailed all our taxpayers. There is information out there. Go to the city's website and you'll find it. I'm trying to incorporate into people reaching out that fact that some people say, I can't understand it online. I don't have anybody to help me online. I've been in business 45 years. I never had to do it this way. We're a friendly to the population city hall. Just walk in and ask. Yes, absolutely. Thank you. With no more questions and no comment cards, you are free to go. Thank you. Thanks to each of you. Up next, we have the CAO's office. We're starting with the Office of Budget and Management. Good morning, Councilmembers. I'm Brandi DeLarge, Assistant CAO. Before I discuss our budget, I want to recognize the Budget Office and our CAO administrative staff. Their work on this proposal began well before the September introduction. Starting in May, the Budget Office worked directly with departments and agencies to help them prepare their requests. Staff held workshops to walk departments through the budget portal, Questica, and to discuss strategies for building their budgets. They also set aside dedicated times for departments to come to the Budget Office, ask questions, and get individual assistance leading up to the July 24th submission deadline. That support takes patience and a great deal of coordination. My staff helped departments work through their submissions while continuing the office's regular responsibilities. I also want to thank our administrative staff, whose work kept the office organized and supported the many meetings and deadlines involved in this process. The Revenue Estimating Conference adopted the 2027 General Fund Forecast on September 10th, and the Mayor introduced the proposed budget on September 22nd. In that short period, the team finalized the numbers, prepared the appropriate legislative documents, and completed the budget book. They put in long hours at the end of a process they had been supporting for months, and I'm proud of what they accomplished. The budget book was an especially important part of that work. We wanted it to do more than present tables and numbers. Our goal was to make the proposal easier for residents and council to understand and to ensure the book reflects Mayor Moreno's priorities and the direction of her administration. As the Mayor and CAO said on September 22nd, this is a leaner budget. There were no easy or good choices among the items reduced or eliminated to balance the 2027 proposal. Those decisions affect departments and the people they serve, and we'll hear more about that in the coming hearings. My presentation today will now focus on my office's proposal. budget, the changes behind it, and the work we plan to carry forward in 2027. Our proposed general fund budget is $2.8 million compared with $1.5 million adopted for 2026, an increase of $1.25 million. Most of that change is in personnel. The proposed personnel budget is $1.7 million, an increase of $1.1 million. This primarily reflects the transfer of existing staff from other agencies to establish and support the Contracts Management Office. The increase in the office's budget should be understood in the context of that transfer of responsibilities and personnel. Other operating increases by $103,000, from $936,000 to just a little over $1 million.

In 2026, non-general fund resources supported a portion of citywide postage costs, and for 2027, we have placed the full citywide postage costs in general fund. The proposed non-general fund budget is $121,000 compared to $350,000 adopted for 2026, a decrease of $228,000. This composition also changes. The proposal includes $121,000 in personnel and no other operating funding compared with no personnel and $350,000 in other operating for 2026. The removal of that other operating amount is tied to the citywide postage funding shift I just described. The personnel amount reflects staffing associated with the office's current responsibilities. Our office has also made changes to control costs. We have reviewed vacant positions and left them unfilled where we can maintain essential functions. We cross-train staff so they can cover work across multiple areas, and we have realigned existing personnel as responsibilities have changed, including the creation of the Contracts Management Office. We have minimized discretionary spending and centralized certain expenses across the CAO's office. That gives us greater visibility into purchases, helps avoid duplication, and makes better use of the resources we have. These efforts build on the spending controls the city put in place during 2026. Our goals for 2027. In 2027, the Budget Office will review departments' quarterly expenditure plans against actual spending each month. We will work with departments as conditions change so that their plans remain aligned with the adopted budget. We will also continue evaluating hiring and spending requests against available funding, city priorities, and the CAO's controls on other operating expenditures. The Contracts Management Office will move into its first full year. Our focus will be on setting clear expectations with departments, improving consistency in the contracting process, monitoring compliance with contract terms, and supporting timely invoicing and payments. We also want to help ensure agreements are executed before services begin. Our administrative staff will continue supporting the CAO Executive Office and other CAO divisions, as well as the Mayor's Office, when needed. They also manage the city's mailroom and the timely distribution of mail. The two project managers assigned to the office will coordinate the city's state cooperative endeavor agreements and assist with contracts, budget work, and other special projects as designated by the CAO. The proposed budget asks every office to be careful with the resources available while continuing to meet its responsibilities. My team understands that obligation. We will continue to provide council and departments with the budget information and support they need throughout this process and as the 2026 budget is implemented. Thank you. Any questions? Council Member Willard. Thank you, Madam Chair. Brandi, thank you for the information and everything that you've been doing to help us get out of this financial crisis. A couple of questions. So on the general fund slide, personnel is increasing attributable to agency transfers for positions in the Contracts Management Office. On the agency and office transfers, were those positions backfilled, like when they left one office? They would not be backfilled. Okay. Like, for example, that's the one decrease we see in NORD, that one position moved to our office. The funding also shifted with that person. Okay. And the non-general fund side, that is just taking out the postage? Is that what that was? Yes, the postage, but the increase is on personnel. So two of the staff that are moving to the Contracts Office primarily will service CDPG grant funding. And so they will retain their grant funding for the majority of their position. They'll have a little bit general fund, but the majority will be grant funded because that's the primary grants they'll be servicing. Okay. The Contracts Management Office, can you touch on that? Was that created this year? Yes. So it's not fully operational just yet. Right. It's in the final stages, and Cameron McAfee, the project manager on Abby's team, is helping us oversee getting that established. And so that will service the executive branches, departments for contracts. So the routing, the management of fiscal from start to finish will be managed by that office. It'll also help us to keep an eye on items of duplicate nature, right? So why do we have three security contracts? Why are we not combining those costs? Why is this one less? Why is this one more? So that'll also be more streamlined as well. So historically, that was kind of handled per office, per agency? Yes. And so we're putting it all under one roof? Yes. For all executive branch offices, yes. And how many people are slated to be there for next year's budget? We have an administrator who will oversee that office. There's two supervisors, and then each supervisor has three staff. And then the project managers that we have, we're retasking part of their work. They will also facilitate contracts as well. Some of the larger heavy lift, like our central adjudication hearing officers, contracts require a little bit more work. So they'll be assigned to those, like they're assigned to the state CAs as well. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. Anyone else? Council Member McKerr. Yeah. I just had one. How many staff did you say were transferred to the contract management office? I have to get you the exact number because we've reduced some. So some of the vacancies that we have, we're using that funding for the project managers who can be multitasked in more than just one area who can manage multiple things. But we lost about three or four already. The number's around 10 or so, but I can get the number from, the exact number from you. Okay. And how many of those are vacant versus? So none are vacant now. All the vacancies were removed as part of our CAO savings, and that work will be shifted in-house.

So that's what I spoke about earlier. The cross-training, we have multiple staff. And our administrative staff are trained on contract work. So we don't plan on filling those vacancies for 2027 at all. Okay. Perfect. Thank you. You're welcome. I just have a couple questions. And Brandi, these may be for you, but maybe they're for CAO Giroux. So it's about specific funds. On page 131, there's fund 7015. There's miscellaneous office administration. Do you know what that accounts for? What page? Page 131. So 7015 is not a fund. It's a department code. Okay. And so that is a miscellaneous department code for CAO, which covers citywide expenditures that don't attribute specifically to the CAO's office. Examples include outside security contract for Mardi Gras, the hotels associated with that in OPSE. That also includes the expenditure for like the LLA. That's not a specific CAO expenditure, but it covers citywide and the CAO manages it. Not in 7015, but in that 7,000 bracket, we also have like the retiree healthcare. That's not a CAO expenditure. So we place it there. We also have a new code, 7040, for city advertising that covers citywide advertising. So that 7,000, why it's called miscellaneous, we try to, that 7015 is like a catchall, right? So we may have different things that come up, maybe it's a council initiative with the mayor, but it needs, it's citywide, it's not for CAO, it falls into that bucket. So what we did a couple of years ago, instead of having it all in the CAO executive budget, we tried to distinguish those so that 7015 would cover those things that would cover more than one area of the city. And it also includes, I was just thinking, the DocuSign, which goes to our contracts that the mayor, the law department, and others will be using to expedite signing of our contracts. Thank goodness for DocuSign and coming into the modern era. So the details for 7015, we can get in Questica? Yeah, we can get it to you as well. Okay, perfect. I think we all want to take a look at that. And then municipal participation grant, 7701, also on that page. That is for Arts Council, it looks like. Arts Council. So Arts Council, this is where SPCA lives. 02 appears to be Council on Aging. Public Defender is 05. SPCA is 7706. And 07, I can't recognize that one offhand, but those are for our partners. And they live in that municipal participation grant. Yes. And they will come before us later in these next 10 days. All right, thank you. Thank you. Up next we have ITI. Hi, Councilmembers. My name is Jonathan Wisby, and I'm the Chief Innovation Officer for the city and oversee the Office of Information Technology and Innovation as part of that role. What I wanted to concentrate on on this first slide is some really important context for understanding this, which is to say that the 2025 budget and the 2026 budget, the transition between those cut about $4.1 million from ITI, from 25 adopted to 26 adopted. And really one of the first tasks that the mayor and the CAO gave me when I was hired in January was to take a look at those cuts and see how to best implement them within the department. In about the spring of that year, I determined that we really couldn't implement all of those cuts without some really significant service impacts. And so working with the CAO as well as with our partner departments, and I think in particular I want to give credit to DPW and to Steve Nelson for their assistance in this, we were able to find other departments that had assistance. associations with the programs we delivered, for instance, the payment for our asset management system, the payment for our geographical information systems, and they were able to absorb those payments so that we could continue those services. What the 2027 budget does is it puts that right. It allows us to continue paying for IT products and enterprise wide IT services that we've always historically paid for. And I also want to note, importantly, it is still a million dollars less than the 2025 budget. So on the next slide I'll give you some insight into how those savings were achieved. So from our 2025 baseline we're down a million, even though from our 2026 adopted baseline we're up three million. Just to kind of ground you in terms of how this impacts both our personnel and other operating budget, the personnel budget increases from 40 to 42 FTEs, but that is the result of a transfer for contracted staff to full‑time civil servant staff. In reality, we actually lost two budget positions in this 2027 budget. So we are seeing a decline in overall staffing, even though it appears to be an increase. On the other operating side, what this does is it does a couple of things. First is it restores some of the funding for core services that was cut with the 2026 budget. And secondly, it really starts to solve a problem, you know, and I think you've heard and you will hear from other departments about sort of hidden costs in the 2026 budget. One thing the city has always struggled to do is to fund the ongoing maintenance of IT systems. We can use capital funding to implement them, but then once they are running, we need to pay to maintain them and continue to have that service, and that is an operating cost. And the city historically has not budgeted well for the general fund cost of maintaining those systems after budgeting for the capital cost of implementing them. We see that this year with our asset management system and our 311 system, and we're making a commitment to budget for those properly in 2027 so that we don't have an issue with trying to make those payments next year. And then, you know, sort of the final thing to talk about here is, to be clear, this also includes the elimination of furloughs for my department. So my department was under furloughs for 2026. It is not for 2027. So part of the increase you see in personnel is also the restoration of that funding to allow the employees to come off of furlough.

And then finally, this allocation for other operating is still 700K less, and then as I said before, the whole allocation is a million less. So you know, I mentioned earlier one of my first mandates was take a look at what we can find in terms of budget efficiencies in the IT budget, and we really tackled this a number of different ways, and I want to give really a lot of credit to the senior staff in my department, especially my deputy CIO, Dennis Kukunga, who has really led up a lot of these initiatives, and our director of operations, Kim LeGru, as well. What we were able to do is eliminate some costs that we didn't necessarily need. I want to focus in on this first one. ITI had a lease on some office space in the DXC building for our cyber command. What we did instead was we transferred that technology to a city hall conference room, and we transitioned to a strategy of more virtual activations and in-person activations and eliminated that lease. We did a lot of auditing of our licensing. We were able to cut down significantly on our costs for Webex, for Zoom, cell phone and Wi-Fi servers within our department to try to right-size some of those expenditures, and then we had to decide on some eliminations of software products and other things as well. In that process, we really tried to look at who's using this, how often is it being used, what is the purpose it's fulfilling. You know, certainly there were many software products that once we went through that evaluation, we decided this would have too severe an impact to the city to cut, but what you see on this list is really something that we decided we could live with. And then I want to also spend a second talking about this last item, public Wi-Fi service. I think in general, we would want a robust public Wi-Fi strategy within the city of New Orleans. The issue we have here is that the public Wi-Fi as it was installed under the prior administration was a little bit offset with other priorities. So for instance, we installed public Wi-Fi at Duncan Plaza. Within a couple of months, there was a fence put up around Duncan Plaza, and the public Wi-Fi service there was hardly ever used. We looked at utilization rates for Lafayette Square for the public Wi-Fi. There was a little bit more use of that, you know, just shy of about 1,000 users a month, with a little bit higher maybe during the Mardi Gras period. We talked with the DDD and a couple of other entities and decided we could remove this without significant service impacts as well. So that was sort of the process we went through to try to determine what we could find savings for in some of the decisions that we had to make. So I want to talk a little bit about 2027 goals. In this first one, I think it risks being a bit of a buzzword, efficiency culture, if I don't go into some detail on what I mean by that. So I want to give you a couple of examples. The first example I would say is we have done a lot of auditing of licensing this year, and really our next step is to institutionalize some of that auditing, to make sure that there are regular points at which IT is constantly reviewing these licenses, making sure that they're the right size, and that we don't end up in a situation where usage of a particular program has dropped off, but we're still paying for it as if it was being heavily utilized. I also think it's about being solution-orientated and trying to find ways to solve problems without having to contract a vendor necessarily. There was a 2024 letter that OIG wrote to the police department and to the CAO saying basically there's an existing issue here with detail scheduling in the city, where the systems where police officers get scheduled in ADP don't talk to the systems that OPSC uses to schedule those details, and they had suggested you should go out and buy a vendor or a software product to solve this. So we're actually able to put together a really important team, and I do want to give a lot of credit here to that team, Akilah Gordon, J.B. Rash, Fabian Barberin, Matt Seagrace, Meno PD, and what this team did is they worked over about a three-month period to develop a way to integrate those systems so that now four times a day ADP police officer schedules are being pushed to the OPSC system, and no OPSC coordinator can schedule a detail during that time. So if there is a detail someone wants to work and they say actually something's just wrong with my schedule in the system, they have to call up the supervisor and get them to change that schedule if that is indeed true. And then the last thing I want to talk about on this is really integrating artificial intelligence into the way that we do things as well. I will say because of the way the city is resourced, we have really had a strong preference for vendor-led AI solutions, and some of the ways that we are looking to improve that is you'll see in a future slide I talk a little bit about, or later in this slide, replacing the permitting system for the city, which was acquired well over 15 years ago. One of the core requirements that we're planning on putting into that RFP is the requirement that there be an initial AI review of documents uploaded by individuals who are looking to apply for permits. The current process, as our understanding is from safety and permits, is that there is sometimes a lot of delay from when a person uploads a document, then a safety and permits person has to review it and determine if it's the appropriate document, and then they communicate with the customer, and that back and forth can last for days or sometimes weeks. So what we want to be able to do is, at the point of upload, say, hey, wait a second, that document you uploaded actually isn't what we're looking for for this particular need. You need a document that has X or Y on it, or a document you can find here, and help to assist the customer at the point of application. So we're looking for a lot of those vendor-led solutions.

There are ways that we're looking to try to demonstrate and pilot more local AI uses, but I would say that, for the most part, the way the city will really utilize AI in the coming year or two is going to be through vendor-supported solutions, because that really expands our capacity to be able to utilize these tools to their full benefit. Next sort of on this list is cybersecurity. Obviously, there are going to be limits to how much I can talk about this in a public forum, but I do want to just make the council and the public aware. We have partnered really closely with CISA. That's the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency at the federal level. They have helped us organize a tabletop cybersecurity exercise earlier this year that we had really robust participation in from our local and regional home and security entities. They also helped really conduct an intensive two-week review of our cybersecurity defenses, and we were able to decrease our risk score by about 85 percent in three months after that review. So they've given us a lot of really actionable items that we've been able to implement that have made the city more secure, and I think our plan for the next year is to continue to build on that and implement some of the larger and more time-sensitive items. The next item we see on here, 311 system. Last month, the city council was gracious enough to approve a contract that allowed us to move forward with the acquisition of the 311 module, which will be fully integrated with our asset management system currently. One of the big holes that we have in 311 right now is that there is no connection there, and the current system is address-based, so it's really difficult to line up to particular assets. Someone might say the corner of two streets, but it may actually mean the traffic light that's facing this way or that way, and it's hard for them to indicate it. The new system will allow them to indicate what specific asset they're calling about and also allow them to keep track of the updates that are made as that work item goes through the asset management system. So we're excited about that. We anticipate a launch date of about Q2 of 2027, so we'll look forward to that, and certainly we'll come to present to the council as we move towards that launch date. The next item on here, the justice technology modernization project. I don't know how much the visibility of this is in the community, but for about the last three years, the city spent about $30 million in ARPA dollars really becoming a model in the country for how to integrate criminal justice IT systems, and they've put in place really – and this is due to really the hard work of Nathaniel Weaver, who's been on this project leading it – it's a really monumental accomplishment, and our job is to continue to make sure that that continues to function. In full disclosure, we didn't get additional dollars to do this in 27 in the proposed budget, so there is some additional funding needs that are required. To the degree that we don't receive them in any amended budget, we'll just have to make additional cuts to our core IT services. So that is an item that exists out there, but this is something that's very, very important to maintain for the overall health of the criminal justice system. I talked a little bit about the llama replacement already. This is a really important thing. I've assigned my deputy CIO to lead this requirements gathering process. We're hoping to release a solicitation sometime in the November timeframe, and we're spending the time in between now and then talking with the dozens of different departments that interact with permitting to ensure that we understand their requirements. And then the last one on there, I just want to make sure people understand that we do have an April 2027 deadline we're working towards on accessibility. disability for our website. Because we have a decentralized website model, a lot of our content editors are at departments rather than centrally located within ITI. So what our web team's been doing has been really going out and training a lot of these people on how to make documents accessible. And this is particularly for people with visual or audio disabilities, but it can be for a lot of different potential disabilities. And so we're training them so that the objects that they upload to our website in the future are created in a way that they're accessible to people with those disabilities. And so that's something we're very focused on with that April deadline looming as well. And that is the conclusion of my prepared presentation. I'm happy to take any questions you have. Thank you. Are we looking at other cities for the replacement of Lama and what they use? Or how are you identifying the new system that would replace it? Yeah, I think we wanted to start with the initial process of requirements gathering internally. Our system is very complex and I think permitting systems in general, the regulatory framework is very heavily between cities. And so we wanted to first start with really a review of what we needed from it, what each of our individual departments and their individual review processes require. Things like the VCC, HDLC, they don't always have analogs in other communities. That being said, I think before the release of the RFP, part of that process is particularly looking at how other entities have structured their RFPs that resulted in systems that we believe are among the leaders in the industry and just learning from that as well. But we have not done an exhaustive search of other cities at this point. So your November timeline is to issue the RFP? To issue the solicitation, yeah. The solicitation. And then there would be, of course, an implementation timeline. Yeah, the implementation timeline is hard to talk to because we haven't gotten responses back. I would ballpark it at about a year, but it could be a little bit longer, a little bit shorter than that.

But I don't expect it to be a quick process. Okay. And then just on 311 system, you're saying Q2 of 2027, is that right? Yes, that's correct. For full implementation? That's correct. All right. Council Member Willard? Thank you, Madam Chair. Jonathan, you said the personnel increase is largely attributable to your team coming off of furloughs? Well, I'd say there's two factors. It's coming off of furloughs, and then it's the addition of the two positions that result from the four contractor conversions. So in that case, it's not actually diminishing the overall budget. It's shifting from operational to personnel. Were those contract positions coming out of your budget before? Yes, out of the operating budget. Now you have benefits associated and everything like that. Is it cheaper to have them in-house or? In the aggregate, we will save several tens of thousands of dollars by doing it, but on a per position basis, it varies significantly. All right. On the other operating side, I see where you have $750,000 for those maintenance payments in the new 311 system, and then you're restoring the budget. If you take out that $750,000, you're still looking at about a million and a half in other operating costs going up. Is that just restoring some of the things that you scaled back this year? Yes. We normally pay the contract for ESRI, which provides our geographical information systems, allow us to do our maps. If you've seen the ICC map, that's required to do that. There's a lot of systems that rely on that mapping technology. We have always paid for that. This year, I had to go to DPW and say, Steve, you are a main consumer of this, and I cannot fund it in my budget. Would you be able to pay for that this year? It's not an ideal way to structure this type of budgeting, but it was unavoidable because of the cuts that we received. What this does is next year allows me to continue to fund it as we have in prior years. Are there other examples of stuff like that where maybe other agencies, departments shared the cost, but in best practice, it should be funded under your department? I think there's a mixture, and some of these are historical reasons rather than necessarily best practice reasons. I think what we have tried to do is say, if you have what we would define as enterprise-wide system, which would be generally two or more departments that are frequent users, that it probably should be a thing in the IT budget. There are exceptions to that. You heard finance has brass in their budget. They have ADP in their budget. Those were implemented primarily as financial systems, and so historically, that's how they've been budgeted, and they have considerable staff to support those systems. For most other systems that would be more than one department, we would be the preferred way of budgeting for those, and certainly for your licensing for things like Microsoft and other things. The slide where you lay out the $1.1 million in cost savings in 2026, was that exclusive for ITI's budget, or were there savings in other departments? Certainly other departments achieved savings that we helped them with, but all of these items are items that specifically were in the ITI budget. So that $1.1 million, does that mean you spent $1.1 million less than you were budgeted, or that was your way to reduce? Less than historical spend. Because again, we received about a $4 million cut, and I couldn't find a way to fully absorb that without really serious impacts to our cybersecurity or our regular services. So that was the way you right-sized the shift this year? We tried to stick to where do we find efficiencies, where do we get rid of programs that aren't being utilized sufficiently, and not let's cut down to the bone and get rid of really core capabilities that residents and departments depend upon. Okay, thank you. Council Member McCarron. Okay, so how many, this is why I've asked for an org chart going forward, if you guys can submit it to me, or to us. How many FTEs do you have currently total? Currently I believe we have 39. Three of the contractors are still on contract. Okay, 39, and you're budgeted for 40, so you'll have one additional hire this year? I believe we're budgeted for 42, or 41. Am I reading that wrong? In the budget book it says 40. Gotcha. So, is it 40, or? I thought I saw 41 or 42 somewhere, so. Yep, I see the 40, I think one of these positions has an allocation of, let's see here, two. I did review it this morning, and I thought I counted an additional one. I may have made an error in that, but I can get back to you with the clarifying information. Okay, yeah, I mean, unless, you know, it just says general fund, 40 positions, proposed 2027, adopted in 2026. Gotcha, so I think maybe I'm off by one then. I think we probably have 38 now, or 37 now, that have an inclusion of three additional contractor allocations. Okay. My other question, I know you talked about the 3-1-1 system. What are the, do you know the overall cost of the system? And what's like the difference, what will it enable us to do? Yeah, so the current system is funded through OPCD, and I don't know the cost of it currently, but it's relatively minimal because it was developed in-house effectively, and they're just paying for quick base licensing. The incremental cost of maintenance for the 3-1-1 system, which is in my budget, is approximately $100,000. Okay. The implementation cost, I'm going to forget it. It was in the $500,000 to $600,000 range, somewhere around there, but that is being funded through capital rather than through operating. Okay, and so going forward, your budget will have the ongoing maintenance, and are we receiving anything from OPCD on that, or like are they helping out with the cost? I have not had that conversation with Carole.

Okay, but they will still be the ones taking the calls? In 2027, I believe they'll have to maintain that cost because we're not implementing until partway through the year, but I would imagine that they will see some savings in 2027, and then certainly in 2028 there will be a savings, but again, I think their overall costs are relatively minimal because they designed the program themselves, and so it's not really vendor-supported, it's just some licensing. Okay, and when you guys have a full rollout of that, will you have a public meeting to kind of talk about so constituents are aware, you know, whether there's going to be any gaps of service and changes that they can anticipate? Obviously, for district council members, that's where everything goes to get out to every department, so as much as information that you can give us ahead of time is helpful. I think we'll need to do that. Just as full disclosure from what we know now, and again, we're very early in the process of implementation, so there may be other things that arise, we're learning that the importation of past tickets is really problematic into the new system because of the way that the past tickets were characterized, so we may need to make a decision about how many of the past tickets we import, if we import them at all, and that would be something we would have to do, I think, in collaboration with the council and with the community to really say, here's the limits that we have, and here's what the potential consequences are, we want to hear from you about how to best limit or mitigate those consequences. So I think there will have to be a public input process along with it, but I would like to get a little deeper in implementation because there's still things I'm sure I don't yet know that will be problematic that will come up as there usually are in these types of projects. Will we lose all that data? No. Okay. The data will exist, period. It's stored locally, and there's not going to be a loss of data. The question is basically how the new system intakes that data and associates it with assets, and it's a complicated thing because the previous system was address-based, and so a lot of times a resident was given no choice but to choose a specific address for the problem they were reporting, and that address is not actually associated with where the issue is. Right. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Definitely let us know about that because, yeah, my concern is that we're going to miss some service requests that we don't know about, and then we'll have no record, and then it kind of, you know, everything goes back into a new queue, which can be complicated, so. Yeah. I think there's a solution we can work out. I think it would be best to develop it. in partnership with the council and the community, but I wouldn't worry about the data being lost. It's just a matter of how the data is treated within the new framework. Okay. Thank you. Council Member, can I just make a comment? So I noticed what came up with John is going to come up with Abby when she presents in Christina. We're looking at the personnel total. So in some of these cases, we didn't add extra people, right? So I'm looking at how the budget was completed for 2026 with our transition team, and in certain cases, as we had the right size parts of the budget, there were random selected codes in CAO. So while CAO has reduced some of their personnel across the board, they may have selected one of these call centers. So Abby didn't add new people, Christina didn't add new people, neither did John, except for the contractors. And so that is going to be a case for some of these offices that exploded in Cuestica, that 2026 amendment update for the budget. That's how some of the budget was completed. Right now, Abby and I are completing the 2026 amended budget. So there are some personnel shift changes for actuals, but none of these areas are included because we're not over budget in the CAO agency or in the 7,700s right now. So that is something for Christina and Abby. So when we get to those slides to give you some preface on that. Okay. Yeah. I did notice there's some in CAO miscellaneous. There's a couple of 7,000 funds that have 7015 has an FTE and some other things. Some of those are accurate. We can go over it in detail with you, but specifically, Abby's going to be presenting on 7030 and 7016, and it shows an increase in her personnel dollar total. But what happened is when some of the actuals were done, instead of saying maybe it came out of these call centers based upon actuals, they chose just those call centers in a lump sum amount, which wasn't even enough to fund one person in some cases. So what they're presenting now is budgeting for actuals. There were no new hires in those areas to exceed what we had at the start of 2026. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Council Member Morrell. Thank you. A couple of quick questions. Well, maybe not so quick. I appreciate you all are budgeting for maintenance costs. I think that's important that we differentiate between the installation costs, which is capital versus the maintenance costs, because as we know, even in this chamber as we speak, maintenance costs are not insubstantial. So I appreciate that's being accounted for. When it comes to the IT part of ITI, have you guys identified any duplicative services? I say that because the council, for example, we have an IT person, but if you have a functioning city hall situated IT office, it is not necessary for departments themselves to have IT persons if they're centralized IT. Have you all gone through the various departments in city hall to see how many have individually assigned IT workers outside of your office? I haven't done a comprehensive study, but I've certainly looked at some specific departments, council included.

You know, I think our issue becomes when you consolidate them, it now takes away some level of service from that department where they're used to having someone sort of available to them at all times, and we've had some friction there in terms of meeting the needs of all of our client departments. That being said, I think that there are certainly some institutional benefits to such a strategy, and I'm definitely happy to work with any department that is interested in doing that. I think it's something that we kind of have to go beyond the talking to the departments. I think it's something we have to look at very closely because when you're talking about, for example, the availability of replacement equipment and the like, having all of that centralized with you, like, for example, if you've got a council member who has a deficient laptop, the person who's our IT person is going to go to your department, hopefully, to see what is available to replace it. I just think it's duplicative when the person who needs to provide the replacement of the service is going to just be interfacing with you as the master IT department to provide the service to the council as a whole. So I know for us, I would appreciate you looking at all the departments that are centrally located in one building and seeing if we can centralize those services because it could save a lot of money. I want to dig into the OPSC conversation, and Mr. Russo was nodding when he said this. I will be very candid, and I'm going to say this to Chief Kirkpatrick when he comes in tomorrow. I do not know why OPSC exists. I understand the idea behind it, which was by prior Mayor Mitch Landrieu that decentralizing detail management was somehow going to prevent the order of corruption. Obviously, that's not the case because we've seen plenty of cases pop up since then. What concerns me is, so for those of you, the three people watching right now on the internet or the thousands, Mr. Green, when it comes to details, when an officer is hired to do a detail, they tag on a $5 to $8 fee that is collected by OPSC to manage said detail, and that is a cost for the most part that OPSC keeps to have OPSC exist. Now there's problems with that. One, as you said, we, and I'm going to be candid, not your fault, Jonathan, but I think we wasted money trying to put OPSC to work with ADP because many of the conflicts you've seen over the years are that OPSC separately as a department did not communicate with ADP. So the reason why you see all these instances in which officers are double dipping or accused of double dipping is because those two systems did not communicate, you could have duplicative entries, whereas in a centralized ADP system, that physically cannot happen. If you try to put in time where ADP has identified time has already been assigned, you literally cannot have duplicate hours. So the fact that we, in my opinion, not your fault, but opinion, wasted money trying to make these systems talk, I think that the second I and ITI, the innovation part, as I told Mr. DeRusso, if you have a functioning centralized system that covers over time and details centralized in NOPD or in the city through ITI, you just don't need OPSC. And that $5 to $8 that is captured for management, that becomes money that rather than paying a third party to exist, is now part of the city budget. I think the other excuse that was used for the creation of OPSC was that at the time the administration did not believe they wanted to generate an additional retirement benefit, that was a silly argument to begin with because over time and details do not go towards base retirement at all. They never have and they still don't. So what I want to encourage you, and I've told Mr. DeRusso this repeatedly, is that almost every other law enforcement in the Grand New Orleans area operates under a quartermaster system where the department itself assigns details, they collect the money from the details for the overhead, and part of the benefit of that is that they create a quartermaster where, for example, bulletproof vests, uniforms, part of the benefit of having the department manage it is that they provide those items. As you know right now, NOPD officers provide a kind of useless stipend for equipment, but if you look at the cost of equipment versus the stipend, the two do not remotely carry each other. I know this is probably going to get me some hate, but the uniforms, for example, and I'll talk to Chief Kirkpatrick about this tomorrow, we are the only department utilizing this baby blue uniform and we are paying a premium because every other department in the country has shifted away from it. So we are paying a vendor to produce a specific color for a specific shirt that we are paying an exclusive premium on for it to exist. Now think about that for a second. Why are we paying more money to have a specific color of a specific uniform when there is an economy of scale just looking what is the cheapest color for a uniform because right now, because officers are paid a stipend to replace their own uniforms, if the cost of that uniform exceeds the stipend, they are paying for replacement uniforms. In Jefferson Parish, for example, because they manage their details, when an officer rips a shirt, they give him a new shirt. When officers' bulletproof vests get beyond their expiration date, they give them a new bulletproof vest. There is no interruption in the use of equipment because the details themselves pay for that equipment. So I would encourage you to go to the second eye and look at the innovation piece because as we are going to have Chief Kirkpatrick come down here tomorrow and complain about all the money she doesn't have, there are opportunities through innovation to have the department generate money that it can utilize for its needs that do not require us to raise taxes at all.

It just requires us to consolidate existing services in a way that A, by having a centralized system where there is ADP or something else, you eliminate the opportunities for double billing completely. Two, by not paying for this vestigial tail that is OPSC to exist, we are not paying these people to kind of exist to oversee a program that through very simple, I mean you probably already have three ideas in your head on how we could do this, like just having a centralized logging system where we assign officers based upon requests. We can do this ourselves cheaper and have the city actually use the money rather than paying for a department we don't need. So I would encourage you while we are doing this budget process and we are looking at ways to generate money that doesn't require tax increases, that is something we can do right now that I think we should really work at trying to accomplish. I need you to innovate, Jonathan. No, thank you. I will say some of that information I wasn't previously aware of and so I appreciate it and we'll certainly take a look at it. I do want to clarify one thing, which is to say certainly we used resources on this project but we didn't actually incur additional costs. So I just want to clarify that one. I appreciate we didn't throw good money after bad, wasting money trying to make those two things talk when really the simplest thing to do would be eliminate one of them and have a centralized system. So I'll work with you offline on that, but I think it's something we can accomplish in the short term that could really have a boon to officers in the city. Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Green. Good morning and thank you, Jonathan, for the presentation. I want to make this as unpolitical as I can so I'm going to look to my CAO. Talk to me and the public about the Orleans Parish Communications District. Is that a city agency and why are we incurring costs to upgrade the technology and the work that is being done by an agency that is not a city agency? city agency. So the first question that I'll ask is my CAO. Under whose jurisdiction does the OPCD fall? OPCD is a state agency. OPCD is a what? A state agency. Yet the city of New Orleans is obligated to invest significant taxpayers' dollars in an institution that provides services on a regional level. Am I correct with that? Yes, I believe so. Yes, you know what I'm doing. At the end of the day, it's yet another obligation of the city of New Orleans relative to something that, I'm not blasting the state because some of this is just etched into policies that haven't been analyzed for a while. But I think that Councilman CAO, I'm going to say that for a while because we served for four years, CAO Gervuso, I appreciate your work. I appreciate the fact that you are an accomplished long-term member of the Council, who is a member of the board, who is a lawyer, who has a lot of options and you've chosen to be here with the city of New Orleans. So I thank Mayor Moreno for what it took to have you here. You're also able to answer questions based on your experience. So my general question to you, is that an issue that we should be exploring, the city spending local taxpayer dollars to invest in enhancements to 311, which is a good idea, but that fall under the cost jurisdiction of just the citizens of New Orleans? I guess, if I could just address the 311 part, I think there's a broader policy issue here you're bringing up that is very pertinent and deserves to be discussed. But on the 311 specifically, I just want to say historically it was a city cost and the city incurred that expense to host. ITI actually was the host of 311 for a number of years. And when you look at other cities' budget, often it is considered a local service because the people responding to the 311 incidents are city departments. And so I think in that particular case, OPCD took it over for a reason that I'm not entirely aware of, but I do think it is inherently and should be primarily a city responsibility. And so that particular part I think is reasonable, but I get your point more broadly about the use of city resources. I'll let Joe address that. I mean, I think John pretty much answered the way I would have, which is this one's a little bit trickier because there is obviously state management and the district itself, as I answered as a state agency. At the same time, I think it's fair to say that 311 calls and certainly 911 calls generally are related to city quality of life issues. So again, this is one that is a balancing act, and I know that you're trying to achieve that as are other members of the council. And then certainly, you've been very clear about other state obligations and how do we just work collectively to try to resolve those. Not everything that I bring up is just for the sake of controversy. It's a good statement that we work well with the state of Louisiana, but we work well with the state of Louisiana in many other areas, and OPCD is a good example. We help keep the citizens of our city and in some respects, our region, unless you tell me that if someone calls 311, they can't report on something in Jefferson Parish? Can they report on something in Jefferson Parish? And I don't know. So I'm asking you something that I will ask you that I will tell you that I just don't know the answer. I've never had anybody say, I called in to 311 and reported something in St. Tammany. Is that something that they can do? My understanding is that it's geofenced in the same way that 911 is, and so depending upon the jurisdiction that you're starting that call from, you'll be referred to that jurisdiction's hotline. So for example, if you call 311 from Jefferson Parish, it connects to whom? Jefferson Parish OPCD. Okay, that's fine. Just wanted to clarify that. But that was just also for the public.

But the bottom line is that we work well together on a lot of issues, and we're going to be bringing enhancements to 311 that are going to be involving our IT service here, and it's a good thing we're doing it within a state agency. That's all. Thank you very much. Any other questions? And no public cards? We can move on to the next. Up next, the Office of Service and Innovation slash Performance and Accountability. Hi, everybody. My name is Abby Via, and I'm the Chief Performance Officer, and I lead the Office of Service and Innovation and the Office of Performance and Accountability. So on this slide, as Brandy said, thank you, Brandy, for prefacing this. In the 2026 budget, we were not budgeted for the cost of our actual FTEs that existed in both offices as of January 2026. So that has been corrected for 2027. So the increase here from 563,000 to 1.2 million is primarily attributable to adjusting for our actual personnel. We have seven FTEs across the Office of Innovation and OPA. We also accounted for, as every other department did, the true cost of health insurance, workers' compensation, to make sure that we're fully budgeting for all of those positions. And on the other operating side, you'll see a reduction of the $17,500, which is essentially the elimination of any other operating funding we'll have in lieu of having our own budget. We will consolidate with other CAO units on any office supplies or purchases throughout the year to hopefully decrease that overhead cost. So as I said, those are the two factors here that you see on the slide. Overall, we're not a super expensive office, so the numbers that I'm presenting on today are relatively small, but I'm happy to answer any questions about them. On the non- Can I just, I just want to, hold on a second. There are many fine departments in the City of New Orleans. Pound for pound, you get the most value out of the Office of Performance and Accountability and Service Innovation. And I'm not saying that, that there aren't other ones, but when you talk about, let's just take the overtime issue that Councilmember Morrell raised, they're the ones who build the dashboard. They're the ones who create the information. They're the ones who follow up with all the departments. They're the ones who follow up on a projected basis for everything. So there's a lot of really important things the City of New Orleans does that provides services to the city, but also so many of the questions today that the councilmembers have asked have been geared towards measuring and management, and so much of that is really housed inside OPA and SMI, and so we make sure that they're getting the proper information. Thank you. Thank you. On this slide here, this is the non-general fund appropriation to the department. This reflects a handful of grant funded, excuse me, grant funded positions that are assigned to the Grants Management Office within the Chief Administrative Office. I believe those are three FTEs, and there's no other operating appropriation in non-general fund. And on the budget efficiency slide, primarily we just didn't spend any money that we didn't essentially have to spend on payroll, so we forewent all other operating expenditures in 2026. We buy our own water. We buy our own coffee. We did not attend any of the conferences we were invited to attend this year. We've also consolidated several senior positions under the office. Also, responsibilities are shared across the CAO leadership team, many of who are at the table today, but we previously had a full-time Chief of Staff position, a Director of Innovation position, and a Director of Administration and Planning. We no longer have any of those positions. We have consolidated those functions across the senior team. What I do also want to mention, which isn't outlined on this slide, is the team, both innovation and OPA staffs, to Joe's point, connection to a lot of the budget efficiencies that you'll be hearing from the departments over the next few weeks, and in particular, last year, as we saw spending trends headed toward a notable spending deficit in 2025, a lot of the work that was done to reduce spending in 2025, instituting a spending freeze, reducing overtime spending, working with departments to minimize any non-essential purchases, as well as responding to the both state requirements and local requirements on reporting, which were contingencies for the city's revenue anticipation note. A lot of that effort came out of the innovation and OPA offices. We have a small team. We worked closely with budget and finance to accomplish a lot of that, but I do just, because I literally have the microphone, want to shout out the work from those teams, just to make it through the end of the year, last year, to ensure that we could continue to make payroll for city employees, citywide, and meet our obligations. And then, of course, this year, working with departments on creating budget efficiencies, instituting quarterly spending reviews with departments, continuing to see reductions on overtime spending, developing revenue enhancement measures, and I think a lot of that work is part of why we're sitting here in a much different position than we were a year ago today. And as for next year, a couple of the goals that we have are outlined on this slide. I won't go line for line, but a couple of the ones I really want to highlight are the stat programming. So this is really an effort that I believe under Mayor Landrieu and under John Wisby really took legs, but this is around using data to inform policy decisions, so monitoring performance indicators and metrics across departments and across functions to understand where resources should be allocated and where departments can potentially adjust how they're operating to improve their service delivery and their efficiencies internally. And so we've seen a lot of that focus on the Department of Safety and Permits this year.

I want to give a shout out to Cameron McPhee, who's the Associate Director of OPA. He's meeting with the mayor this afternoon to discuss a public-facing dashboard on permitting, and he's worked closely with Susanna Kirby to stand that up. We're very excited about it, and I think it's a model that can be replicated for other departments in 2027 and beyond. As has been discussed here before, we're working on the re-procurement of our parking and traffic photo enforcement and collections vendors. That's going to be a large undertaking, and that solicitation is in its final phases now before it hits the streets and is open for bid. We're working to understand with the Department of Finance our cash-level transactions and our grant reimbursement mechanisms and building tools like Power BI to extract that data from BRSS to be able to give decision makers and the department a better understanding of exactly how all of our bank accounts and different transactions are occurring. That has been instrumental in understanding our cash flow. This year, and obviously that is something the Department of Finance has led and we've continued to support, is just understanding how much cash do we have, where is the cash, and what that's going to look like going forward. And then generally working on transparency, continued collaboration with departments, understanding where we can both improve service delivery for communities and residents, but then also find internal efficiencies to keep overhead costs low and increase revenue opportunities wherever possible and appropriate. As Brandy mentioned, the new Contracts Management Office is opening next month. We're excited to continue to support that effort and ensure that coordination is happening across the contracts management citywide. And we also do a lot of work around the Orleans Parish Prison and their jail health care contract and so continuing to work alongside the Sheriff's Office and the Health Department and the Office of Criminal Justice on those efforts, especially headed toward the Phase 3 extension. And lastly, just continued use of data across city departments to give departments the tools that they need to be able to understand the impact they're having, how can they improve their service delivery, or also how can they just promote their service delivery. A lot of departments are doing wonderful things and have made huge strides and so we want to be able to give them the opportunity to share that publicly or monitor it internally. With that, that is my presentation and I'm open for any questions. Thank you, Abby. I just want to thank you for working closely with Dominique in my office to get that data dashboard up on the Mayor's Office side and the City Council side, showing real-time budget to actuals and spending. I think that was a good step in the right direction. I do look forward to seeing the millage calculator up and running and I think that's very important. How many FTEs do you have that are general fund funded? We have seven FTEs. And then the grant funded? That would be three FTEs. Three. And what happens when those grants run out? So those grants, I believe, are grants we expect to continue through 2027. Just to give, I know that this is a little bit strange that we have those positions in the office budget here. I think this predates back to when we initially received ARPA funding and the first sort of ARPA project manager is, to Wisby's point, Jonathan's point, Nathaniel Weaver really led up the Justice Tech modernization program. That predated the ARPA project management office and so Nathaniel was placed in the innovation office and he functions as one of my direct reports even though, of course, he's super autonomous. But he has historically been budgeted out of innovation and now that we shift out of having this large ARPA funded, ARPA PMO, we now have them and we've reduced that significantly. We are now using the best and brightest of that team and deploying them on the grants management side. They are funded with long-term grants in the absence of the ARPA funding that expires this year and that's why you see them in our office. I would also say that they were traditionally funded with general funds but because we're able to shift some of the funding to grant to offset the general fund, we will do that in any situation when we can. So they were already on general funds so this actually helps the budget for this year and going forward as long as we have those grants. Okay, great and I love the use of data to inform policy. Council Member Willard, did you have your button pushed? Okay, Council Member McCarron. I think actually you asked my question about the FTEs. You said that 2026 though you were under budgeted? Yes, we were budgeted at an amount, to Brandy's point, that did not accommodate the existing seven FTEs and their cost. I think it was a decision made during the transition around reducing personnel costs with not corresponding reduction in the actual staff so none of us were laid off during the transition. We had no new hires in 2026 so it's the same people who were here in January. We're just making sure that that funding is appropriately accounted for. Okay and then and so you're just budgeted for seven FTEs general fund this year and then three grant funded for next year? That's correct. Okay. Okay, thank you. And we'll get you an org chart. Yes, please. Just one follow-up question to Council Member McCarron. Are you guys furloughed? Yes, partially furloughed. I'm furloughed. Certain people have been exempted based on the nature of their duties and I believe that the people who are fully grant funded are also exempted. So part of this amount, the 712, accounts for the non-furlough in 2027? Correct. No furloughs are incorporated into our 2027 budget.

And just going forward for any of these presentations, are we taking into account for personnel the furlough versus non-furlough? There are no furloughs included in the 2027 budget so every personnel increase that you will see will assume no furloughs. Most departments have at least a couple employees who are furloughed so even the police department or others, you know, you'll see a little bit of an uptick in that. There are only a couple of departments that I can think of that are fully exempt as of now so you won't see any impact on the furlough being eliminated in 2027. Thank you, Abby. The healthcare costs should be included too as well. They went up over $2,000 per employee and the workers comp increase as well so that you may see a department, I think we have civil service coming up, they didn't have any new employees but they show a slight increase because of those fringe benefits as well. Okay, got it. Thank you. Any other questions? All right, let's move on. All right, I think next up is Office of Labor and Employee Relations and kind of much like Brandy, Christina and her team do things behind the scenes that are unsung so most of the things are that affect us on a day-to-day basis but not everybody sees it. So, Christina? Good morning, Councilmembers. I'm Christina Hamilton, Assistant CAO for Human Resources. Thank you for the opportunity to present the Office of Employee and Labor Relations proposed 2027 budget and priorities. Our office includes employer relations, personnel and training, benefits administration and recruitment. I'll briefly review our proposed budget, highlight our 2027 health plan cost containment strategy and discuss our key workforce priorities. Our proposed 2027 general fund budget is approximately $3.9 million compared with approximately $3.74 million in the 2026 adopted budget for an overall increase of approximately $159,000. Personnel increases by approximately $364,000 due to budgeting for actuals which Assistant CAO DeLarge just explained due to the budgeting process that took place during the transition. And our other operating decreases by approximately $205,000 or 37.2%. We will continue to coordinate across CAO HR and other CAO divisions to reduce duplicative spending, streamline the use of available resources and operate as efficiently as possible. One of our most significant areas of focus for 2027 is managing the cost of the city's self-funded health care plan. The city's recent claims experience demonstrates the need for action. In 2025, gross medical claims were approximately $53.5 million compared with approximately $44 million in 2024. Gross pharmacy claims were approximately $26.3 million compared with approximately $16.8 million in 2024. Overall plan costs were approximately $80.7 million and net employer cost was approximately $62.3 million. As a self-funded plan, the city bears the financial impact of claims experience. These trends reinforce the importance of managing cost while balancing the impact on employees, retirees and their families. Hub International is the city's health care consultant and they have identified more than $31 million in potential savings associated with a range of health plan changes. After evaluating the available options and their potential impact on both employees and plan participants, the city elected to pursue a more measured approach with a combination of initiatives representing approximately $11.95 million in savings versus the $14.8 million you see on your slide. I'm going to make that update shortly. The strategy is diversified across the plan design, pharmacy, eligibility and coordination of benefits, site of care and employee contributions rather than relying on a single cost reduction measure. Please note that the narrow network option listed on the presentation is not being implemented at this time. The projected components are approximately $3.9 million from plan design, $2.7 million from pharmacy initiatives, $3.08 million from eligibility and coordination initiatives, $1.64 million from site of care strategies and $647,000 from employee contributions. For active employees, 2027 introduces two medical plan options. The active PPO has a $1,000 individual deductible. Employees will also have a new high deductible health plan with a $3,000 deductible using the choice network. Compared with 2026, the PPO has a higher cost sharing in several areas, including the individual deductible, individual out-of-pocket maximum, office and specialist co-pays, emergency room co-pay and certain pharmacy co-pays. However, the family out-of-pocket maximum decreases from $13,500 to $12,000 and employees gain a second medical plan choice. The high deductible health plan provides lower employee payroll deductions than the PPO but carries a higher deductible, of course. It is an HSA compatible plan under the current design. There are no employer HSA contributions assumed at this time. For the active PPO, the base dental, the employee and spouse and employee and family contribution tiers have increased by $20 per month. However, the employee only and employee and children rates remain unchanged. For pre-65 retirees, the city is establishing a separately self-funded retiree PPO plan with its own plan design and stop loss arrangement. Hubs updated January through June 2026 experience also shows why this is necessary. The retirees no Medicare population averages 555 subscribers down from 600 for the same period in 2025. Despite that enrollment decline, gross plan costs increased from approximately $5.83 million to $7.17 million and per employee per member increased from $1,620 to $2,154 or approximately 33%. Retirees represented approximately 10.5% of average enrollment but 15.6% of gross plan cost with per employee per member approximately 57% higher than the active employee population. These figures refer to retirees no Medicare and subscriber accounts and do not include covered dependents.

The individual deductible increases from $750 in 2026 to $1,250 in 2027 for retirees and certain co-pays and out-of-pocket limits also change. The separate design allows the city to address the retiree population distinctly rather than placing pre-65 retirees in the active select choice structure. Beyond the health plan cost containment, our priorities are to strengthen employee health, wellness, and productivity, streamline HR operations, and strengthen professional development, support employee recognition, engagement, and retention, maintain constructive labor management relationships, focus recruitment on critical and hard-to-fill vacancies, and expand educational, professional development, and financial resource partnerships. We will continue with the Mayor's Outstanding Employee Award Program, Preventive Health and Wellness Initiatives, Health and Wellness Clinics, and the annual Health and Wellness Fair, which will be this Friday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., please come out, HR training and professional development, targeted recruitment strategies, and partnerships that connect employees with educational and financial resources. Overall, our 2027 priorities reflect a balance between fiscal responsibility and workforce support. We are focused on managing health care costs, operating HR efficiently, supporting our employees, maintaining constructive labor relationships, and recruiting and retaining the workforce necessary to provide services to the City of New Orleans. Thank you and I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you. That was informative. October 1st is open enrollment? Yes, ma'am. And when does it end? October 31st. Okay. And during that time, are you all communicating these changes to city employees? Absolutely. We have it all queued up and ready to go. Yes, ma'am. Okay. And when does that start rolling out? It's going to start rolling out right today. I think it just rolled out. Yes, ma'am. Okay. Thank you. Director Willard. Thank you. Thank you, Kristen. That was a lot of information. So I just have, I guess, a few questions, mainly on the health care side. Absolutely. But on the personnel budget, an increase of $364,000, does that account for any of your staff coming off of furlough next year? Yes, that accounts for that as well. Yes. Okay. I guess, overall, with the health insurance changes, my concern, it may be, you know, not properly based, but are we basically transferring just more of the cost onto city employees? No, the city is definitely bearing the brunt of the cost of the health care insurance. With the changes in this? Yes. We're still carrying most of the cost, absolutely. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Just to complete this. Also, we provide the health care costs for a lot of the health care for a lot of the outside agencies, too. So just make sure that, as we're doing all of this, it's not just the city. It's also many of the outside agencies as well. Okay. The Select Ochsner Network savings, it said they were modeled for a 6% reduction in medical claims. Can you? We're scrapping that. Okay. How do you propose for this plan year? Yeah. I wanted to know how do you do that, like in actuality? I mean, you can model to reduce, but in actuality, how do you reduce the claims? It's a matter of also looking, Council Member, at the number, the sheer volume of claims. And just for, again, the totality of employees, so it's not just the city. More dollar amount claims were with one health care provider as opposed to the other. So as a result of what was being proposed, then having that be the leader of that, not sole provider, but a select provider, was going to induce the proposed savings. But I think, in retrospect, given that there's already these other changes, we will wait to roll it out in 2028 instead. Okay. Public watching this, my question just overall would be, are the employees paying more to get less? Absolutely not. We have the HSA available now. Yes. I saw that. That's a good move. That we didn't have that option available before. Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Okay. All right. Thank you, Kristen. You're welcome. Council Member McCarran. Okay. Sorry, I'm still not clear. So, the select OSHNER network is not being implemented for next year? Okay. Okay. And then what is the new cost per, if an employee is just paying for themselves? You said there's no additional cost? Employee only has no change, and employee and child or children has no change. Okay. It's only going to be the only changes to employee and spouse and employee and family. Okay. And it's going to be an additional $20 per month for each of those tiers. Okay. Great. I saw on, in the CA, a miscellaneous budget, there's this new section, Brandy, 7-112, says hospitalization section. Is that for this cost, or what is that? Partial. So, that is when, we work with finance a lot, right, to get the fringe, right? So, that's where some of the bulk of the costs have come that, the debt service, right? So, that is specifically for the retirees who are under, who are not eligible for Medicare. So, that has not previously been appropriately placed in the budget, so that cost is specifically for retirees. Okay. Okay. Thank you for clarifying that. One other question on enhanced recruitment for critical vacancies, and just, you know, what are you guys going to be doing, sort of, next year to have workforce development incorporated into how you are recruiting, for example, with electricians, something we talked about with Director Nelson, and our unions, you know, what kind of partnerships is the city working towards to help strengthen, you know, if they have apprenticeship programs for electricians, how are we going to work with those, our local labor unions to have a pipeline into city government positions that we know that we are actively hiring for electricians, that sort of thing? Absolutely. Our recruitment team is very active. I don't know if you see them on social media.

They're always making videos and everything, always announcing the critical positions that we have available. We meet with departments. If you let us know that you have a critical position you're trying to fill, we'll immediately come over and meet with you and see what your priorities are. We go to universities, all the local universities. We go to Tulane. We go to Loyola. We go to Xavier. Anywhere. We go to many different job fairs. We are constantly working, working to make sure we keep the city staffed up for any critical vacancies that we have. Okay. I would encourage you to work with our local union, too, because they do have an apprenticeship program. I think they're trying to, especially with some of the stuff that we've been working on with our virtual power plant, our community solar, those are all jobs that the electrical union are working to build towards, too. I think they could be also good for the city. Definitely reach out with them and work with them on how you can create that sort of pipeline into this position. Absolutely. Yes, ma'am. Just a couple more questions that sparked. I do think the one-time audit of the eligibility is critical. I know that sometimes kids become 26 and they're still on their parent's plan, so I think that's really important that we do. It's a one-time audit? Yes, ma'am. Once a year? Are you planning to do that going forward? One-time audit for now, but we'll keep looking at things and seeing if we need to do it again. Absolutely. On audit, I know CAO Jerusa and I, sorry, or Joe, talked separately about a staff audit. Is that something that your department would conduct? We can help with that. Absolutely. Yes, we all work together. We work with everybody. We work with civil service. We work with whoever we have to work with. We can absolutely work together to conduct whatever type of staff audit we need to conduct. Absolutely. Yes. There aren't people on our staff roles that aren't actually staffed, that aren't actually here anymore. I think we found an instance of that when traffic enforcement went over to NOPD. Yes, ma'am. Absolutely. Thank you. Any other questions? Let's keep rolling. All right. Thank you. Thank you all to the team who, again, I think so much of this work you see up here is behind the scenes. It's so critical to the city. I think next up we have Megan Williams. All right. Good afternoon. I'm Megan Williams. I'm the Chief Sustainability Officer for the City of New Orleans. Thank you guys for allowing us to present today and present our budget. For those of you who do not know, we are the climate action arm of the city. We create all of the climate policy and do a lot of the implementation as well. Historically, our office has managed the Dentility Resilience District, the EPA Climate Pollution Reduction Act grant, hazard mitigation grants, and a host of other climate mitigation grants. However, some of these grants are also managed by other departments. We also do the large majority of stormwater management planning and implementation of these projects. We are very slim in our budget. As you can see, there was nothing adopted for 2026. And even for 2027, there is a very small percentage of personnel funding. The majority of it is operating, which results in about $177,000 budget for our office. The proposal for the $22,000 in personnel is to move two of my staff members to split funding to help with some of the administrative purposes of our office. The majority of that falls all on me right now. There's a lot of logistics and planning that needs to be done through our office that we could just use some assistance with, but all of our office otherwise is grant funded. There were no general fund hires in 2026. The only hiring that we did was for our energy program manager, which was funded through the EPA CPRG grant. The reduction in costs for the operating budget is reflective of reducing funding for recycle debt and Christmas tree recycling, unfortunately. Given the majority of our other expenses are for personnel and consent decree efforts, which is the bottom bullet there, it was a tough decision between other programs. But there is also a funding line for the Climate Action Plan for 2027. Because we are a C40 city, we are required to update the Climate Action Plan to maintain our status. So our intention is to update that plan, but also we've been exploring other opportunities to help fund it. If we can find other opportunities to fund it, I can help, I can repurpose that funding to hopefully back to recycle that in the Christmas tree recycling. But we are under consent decree by EPA and LDEQ for certain environmental sites like Gordon Plaza and Recovery One to maintain the grass around them and also to do some water quality testing. The water quality testing for this year has been moved to sanitation. We are going to maintain the funding for the maintenance at these sites, particularly Recovery One. Gordon Plaza will be turned into a solar farm. We are anticipating issuing that RFQ any day now for advertisement, but we as a city are required to maintain access to the site for Recovery One so that we can submit our water quality reports to DEQ in a timely fashion. In our 2026 budget, you can see the bulk of it is on other operating. There's a significant portion, the $31 million in other operating that was proposed for 2026 has been reduced by about $5 million and that's reflected through a couple of different measures. One of those being grant writing services. We did have a contract at one point for an outside consultant to do grant writing for us. We have eliminated that. And a portion of that is also included in the Swiffer grant, which was the recycling and solid waste master plan was on other operating as well because it was EPA funded. It was not general funded.

The $250 million that you see proposed for the personnel is for pretty much myself and the proposed two employees to be split funded, which results in about $25 million in other operating. Included in this is also the 5135 fund, which is green infrastructure maintenance. It is the only eligible fund in the city for green infrastructure maintenance that is not directly in Fund 1000 for the general fund. Again, we have not utilized the entire amount of the 5135 for the green infrastructure fund, but this will allow us to maintain the existing sites for green infrastructure that the city has implemented through grant funding. Unfortunately, none of those grants include maintenance funds, so we have had to get creative in how we maintain them. And we've been working very closely with a couple different agencies to try to utilize some of these funds and make this work a little bit better than it has in the past. On the other operating, you can see that there's also the Gentilly Resilience District grant, which is managed through our office, but the majority of the other operating is the climate pollution reduction grant with all of the different measures, including energy efficiency, municipal decarb, e-bikes, and protected bike lanes. Some of the budget efficiencies that we've implemented this year is sort of right-sizing some of the responsibilities in our office. We were downsized pretty significantly coming into the transition, and we've been able to sort of repurpose some of our positions in our office that currently exist to distribute the responsibilities. We've again been hosting and collaborating with a lot of community groups in our current project areas to address some of the maintenance. This is community groups. This is some of our consultants that have done work with us. We have been trying to get really creative in getting more boots on the ground to address some of this work in the most creative fashion. And one of the big things that we've done is we've consistently organized service days in our communities to address these things very directly. Our goal for 2027, I won't read all of these, but going back to the Ag Street solar farm, which is also considered Gordon Plaza, our intention is to turn this into a solar farm. Because this is a landfill site or a super site, we are not able to disturb a lot of the ground, so we have to be very mindful of the work that we can do. But the intent is to turn it into a solar farm, and again, that RFP is planning to be issued here in the next couple of weeks and is currently with purchasing. Through the CPRG grant, we're also intending on identifying some energy efficiency recommendations throughout 41 city-identified buildings. That project is kicking off next week with the first round of assessments. We're also looking at 14 buildings for solar photovoltaic installations, which should help with some of the lighting in our buildings as well and also create some energy efficiency. There were 14 that were originally identified. We're currently going back through the list to see if those sites still make sense, and we're working very closely with property management and capital projects on that as well. And then the construction of Lincoln Beach Phase 1, that is a capital project, but it is being managed through our office and through me directly, so our intention is to complete the construction of Phase 1. And the big goal for 2027 is to implement and update the Climate Action Plan, again, going back to it as a requirement for C4E membership. So we are exploring some options with our climate mitigation partners, like Ganoff, the Water Institute, and trying to find some options on how we can create a very robust plan that creates some equitable distribution of climate actions throughout the city. That's it. Thanks, Megan. I have a couple questions before I turn to Councilmember McCarran and Green. Saratoga lot, is that included in the non-general fund money? It's currently included in the hazard mitigation grant for DPS01 for Broadmoor. We are still waiting to hear back from FEMA on that extension to do the work. We have submitted the request already, but we have not gotten anything certain back from them yet. So we're following up, I think, almost weekly to biweekly with them right now. Does that live in your budget, or does it live in DPW's budget? It would likely live in ours under bond funds if we were able to do it. If we are not able to do it with HMGP funds, we would have to do it with bond funds. So we would have to get creative in how we move some of that funding towards that project. And the maintenance of that lot, sorry you guys to get detailed, but this is important for District B, the maintenance, Parks and Parkways cut it. It doesn't, maintenance doesn't live with you. It does not, not for that site at all. So we're trying to figure out what department. Yeah, it would, it has never really lived with us as a budget item because we've never taken over the site to do the project itself. So in future endeavors, once it is completed, it would fall under us, but not currently. That does not live in our budget. This just goes to the efficiency that can be had when departments actually figure out who's cutting what and who's doing what. I know there was some confusion over the maintenance of this lot and who was cutting it and who wasn't. Looking forward to getting that straight. On your other operating, it says reduction of funding for recycled at and Christmas tree recycling. It's actually elimination, isn't it? It is elimination, but I put it as reduction because if we're able to find other funding for the climate action, I could repurpose it back to those. It would just be at a lesser amount than in previous years. So Christmas tree recycling, I just looked at the budget proposal that was given to us last week. It's about $20,000. That's it. That's it. Yeah.

In previous years and what we're going to try to explore for the next year is partnering with more of our partners. I think Glass Half Full did some of that work last year. So we're going to still try to find as many opportunities to utilize the work. There's sort of a two-step process with the Christmas tree recycling. The first step is collecting that, which I think some of that has previously been shared with sanitation. Right. And then the second part is being able to bundle that. And that's where we really found the gap this year because that can be relatively expensive to add that to it. So I'm putting that with a little bit of an asterisk next to it because I would like to be able to repurpose those funds to do some work. And then we recycled that for the public's knowledge. They recycle during Mardi Gras events. They pick up cans, beads, et cetera. Have we ever done an analysis of the impact, their economic impact of them recycling and what we pay them to recycle versus tonnage and just hauling it and putting it in a landfill somewhere? I think there's some data from both our side as well as from Recycled At's side. So we would need to get them both in front of us and compare them to see what the benefit and the cost is. Can you get that to us before the end of budget season? Because it's important to know that if we actually fund Recycled At, then we could save money on proposed cuts to Mardi Gras. Sure, I'll get with sanitation and look at their numbers and see if they have it divvied out that way. And then I'll get some numbers from Recycled At as well. Yeah, send it to all of us, please. All right. I think that's all I have. Thanks, Megan. Council Member McCarrick. Thank you. And thank you, Council Member Harris, for bringing up the Christmas trees. Because you know, I think it's important. I know it's only $20,000, but it has a huge effect on restoring our coastline. So my question about that is, are there other cities in the state that are doing this? If so, how are they funding these programs, and is there state or federal funding that we could figure out how to get to use? I mean, we're restoring the coast, so essentially helping the state in general. Do you know about other cities that are doing this? Yeah, Jefferson Parish has done it, and they've funded it a couple of different ways. I believe they've had grants in the past to do it, but they've also used some of their own funding. One thing that I have been doing is talking to some of our coastal restoration groups to see if there's a way that they could assist us with that. In the past, the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana has done volunteer days, but it's been very specific, the type of work that they've done on the volunteer days, which is just a small departure from what we need. So I am having those conversations with our coastal groups. I need to have the conversation with like Pontchartrain Conservancy to see if there's some ways that we could get volunteer days to do this type of work. Yeah, if you need help with that, in fact, I'm going to say, let's have another conversation about this. If you need to come to a climate committee and we need to talk about this and get our coastal partners and figure out how we can make this happen, I think it's just incredibly, incredibly important that spending $20,000 to help restore our coastline is vitally important as part of the bigger picture. So let's definitely plan on talking about that more. Sure, we've had great success with that program in the past, so it's not a desire to have to cut it by any means, but if we have to trim down, unfortunately it was one of the ones that seemed like it could be on the chopping block. But I would love to do it, and again, I've had some preliminary conversations with with our coastal groups to see what that might look like to get probably several days of organizing. I think where we could probably use a lot of the help is on the pickup and finding some more unique ways to cut the cost on the pickup side of things to actually get the trees to the location to get the drop-off done. Okay, great. I look forward to talking more about that. The only other question I had, you know, I know you talked about the CPRG grant, but how many employees do you have in your office? We currently have eight employees in our office. All are grant-funded right now. And you just hired a new one to help with the climate grant? Yes. Okay. I guess we won't talk about benchmarking because you guys are gonna have that next year, but additional reporting on that would be great as you guys move forward on that. That's basically all I have. Yeah, I can add on the benchmarking piece. We are intending to hire someone full-time through the CPRG grant, specifically to manage the benchmarking portion. What we are doing right now is reviewing the job description that's gonna go out. We intend to post it in the next month so that we can start the hiring process, or the interview process, I should say, to get someone on board. Because that is a fairly full-time job just to do benchmarking. So as we've onboarded our energy program manager, she's been reviewing the process and the ordinances and all the documentation about benchmarking to get herself familiar with it. And then our next step is to hire someone to do it under her guidance as well. Okay, perfect, thank you. Council Member Gray. Good morning, and thank you for your presentation. I wanna start off with the good by thanking you for your willingness to meet with community members at their Neighborhood Association meetings. That's important that they know that you're available. Sometimes the questions get answered before them, but when you're there, they appreciate that.

I also wanna thank you for working with the businesses along Allegiant Fields Avenue and residents who you might have seen to prepare them for what's going on at the Blue-Green Corridor project, and also for emphasizing the value to that entire community because those bioswales and those areas do work. Puncture Train Park and Gentilly Woods, for example, experience less flooding in part because hundreds of thousands of gallons of water can be stored before it hits the drainage system. But with that, I'll ask you, I didn't hear the answer that I wanted to hear relative to maintenance monies. So tell me about maintenance of those bioswales, what we can do moving forward within the budget or with either a private assistance or public assistance to get those maintained better for the neighbors. Sure, so that's the 5135 stormwater fee-in-lieu fund. That is intended to be used for green infrastructure maintenance. That's what we're using right now. We've been able to attribute about $300,000 towards that funding. It has taken a long time to get them back in working order, and we're still parsing through the list right now. We're looking at different workforce development opportunities as well to help fund some of the maintenance that needs to happen out there. And then in addition, one of the things that we are looking to do is something called Adopt-A-Stormwater Lot, which is very similar to what the state does for Adopt-A-Highway, and see if we can partner either with residents or community groups or consultants to help do some of that work to keep those lots in working order. So our current contractor, Groundwork New Orleans, has been charging through the list that we were given by your office of the priority lots, and we're going through every week and updating the priorities with them to make sure that we're knocking them down consistently and then getting them back in working order in a routine fashion. So if we can continue to utilize that fund, that will help us keep all of those things in working order in the way that they were intended to operate. The bottom line for the communities, Gentilly Woods and Punta Train Park, is that we are working every day to maintain those lots and that you would see by maybe the end of November, they could all be remediated, or what do you feel? Yeah, I believe we'll be close to probably the beginning of November because we'll have a much more robust staff out there that we've been able to subcontract some of the work for the bigger lots that need some work done on them. So they are starting to move through them a lot faster, and then they're also starting to loop back on the ones that have been cut to keep them at a manageable rate. So we are intending to have all of them done. There are a handful of them that are holding water, and I've reached out to Sewage and Water Board to assist with some of those things. We've identified some of the problems with those. So pretty much every day, we have some sort of conversation internally about what to do with each of those lots. How can the private sector, those who are interested in environment and sustainability and resilience, how can they assist your office? You mentioned the project potentially adopting a stormwater lot, but are there other means that people can use to work with your office, and how would they contact your office? Yeah, we're always open to opportunities to figure out what that looks like in different neighborhoods. Each neighborhood has a different need. So we would love to take them on, and any consultant or private business that wants to work with us, they can reach out to myself or our communications director, Lauren Muse, to figure out different opportunities to maybe hand over some of that work to them, and they can assist in moving that needle forward. It's important to recognize that there are some folks from the private sector who want to help, might even be willing to help with some of those bioswales, to be very honest with you. I know that it's a little bit of a challenge because of the hill that goes into the area that collects the water, but maybe on the peripheries, there are some organizations that have talked about helping because it is a challenge as we move forward. Yeah, we're open to any opportunity and help we can get. Can you talk about, briefly for the public, the challenges that have been created by cuts in federal funding and also some of the opportunities that might exist in the future because these are such important areas in which you work? Sure. In general, there has been a big shift in funding towards any sort of climate solutions. And historically, we have been, all of the work that I've mentioned today is disaster recovery money. So it is a direct result, especially on the stormwater side, it's a direct result of Hurricane Katrina for the majority of them. The climate of federal funding has shifted away from a lot of that work across the board. We've seen grants canceled or programs canceled like the BRIC funding program under FEMA that has since been restored. But without those pots of money to do these large-scale capital projects, it is going to be very hard for us to consistently do the scale of projects that are really meaningful to address, specifically stormwater management. But for all of our climate vulnerabilities, it's going to be very hard for us to do this work without federal funding. In the long term, we would love to become a city that can self-fund a lot of this work, but it is going to take us some time to do that. But we also have to keep in mind that with these projects comes maintenance. And none of the federal grants consider maintenance in their funding opportunities. So we have to be very mindful of how quickly we put projects out, but also ensure that we're bringing maintenance to the forefront throughout the design process so that we can have opportunities to maintain that's not so costly and burdensome on us as well.

So we're going to continue to be a climate-vulnerable city from coastal flooding, like Council Member McCarran was mentioning, with the Coastal Tree Recycling Program. So if we don't have funding and we fully rely on the federal pot, it's going to be difficult for us to do these projects in the future. And I'd like to emphasize the positive. We're moving forward on very important projects. It's not just a blue-green card. Talk to us for a second about what's going on at the Willie Hall site. Sure. So the Willie Hall site is one of the Gentilly Resilience District projects. There's about $141 million in funding from HUD to do the work in Gentilly to mitigate some stormwater flooding. So the Willie Hall site is a site that was operated by NORD but a part of the McDonough 35 school. We have transformed that site into a stormwater management site by installing tanks under the playground. You cannot see it today. It looks like it's just been restored with soil and grass on top of it. But there's a system of about 5 million gallons of storage underneath that park in particular, and it allows water to come in from the drainage system, fill up the tanks, and then exit slowly back to the drainage system. And that allows us to just take a little bit of pressure off of the immediate needs of the pump stations in the area. When the plans are finished, there will be a field track on top of it as well as a baseball field and a building for NORD to operate their equipment out of or store their equipment out of. So it's one of about nine projects in the Gentilly Resilience District suite. Thank you very much for that information. My last question refers to Councilman King's district, but on yesterday, the green infrastructure for Treme project was medicated. Councilman King, I'm not trying to take any of your thunder, but it's another example of the state and the city working together to get something done. Could you talk about that particular project for a second? Were you there yesterday? I was, yeah. So that site as well as the Vision to Reality site on Claiborne are examples of community-led green infrastructure projects, and these are really meaningful projects that community groups like WaterWise and Healthy Community Services have been able to implement through partnerships with the city and the state. There's opportunity for other sites like this that are DOTD-owned but city-operated that we can utilize for these community-led green infrastructure sites, and it's really transforming a space that we as the city often have not had as a priority or have had funding to do in previous years. These community groups have really led the charge in advocating for this scale within their neighborhoods, so people, not just for the stormwater side of it, but it also addresses the extreme heat issue that we have by installing trees in some shaded areas, and it allows people to, it brings people into a site very meaningfully to exist within their own environment. I know that it's a challenging time, but I'm emphasizing those projects to just let the public know that work is still going on in important areas in our city that is making our city more resilient for the future, and I want to thank you for your office. There's a number of projects that you're working on that are making a great difference. The release of requests for proposals relative to the agricultural solar farm is such a significant change from where we were four years ago, and that is why government sometimes has to spend money to get certain things done. To relocate the residents of the Gordon Plaza subdivision, I don't know the exact dollar amount, but it was millions of dollars, and now it's gonna result in a solar farm that just like the solar farm that the Sisters of the Holy Family are sponsoring can provide potential relief to residents nearby. So it's just good news stories that we need to emphasize in the midst of these challenging times that many of those projects continue to happen, and I thank you for your work in making some of those happen. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Green. That sparked a thought. A.L. Davis Park, the grass is dying. That is a water retention project. Do we have money in the budget to restore the grass? So they just replaced the grass Saturday, I believe, either Friday or Saturday at A.L. Davis. So they'll be watering it in over the next couple weeks to ensure that it establishes. We did shift to a different method of installing the grass that has a much higher percentage of establishing itself. So we should not have that same issue that we had with the previous integrations of it. So over the next two to three weeks, you should see a distinct difference in A.L. Davis' quality. You'll see the same at Taylor Playground as well, where the entire park will be redone with sod rather than seeding. So we had a lot of conversations with our landscape architect and with our contractors on getting that grass restored to a proper working order where we can actually turn it back over to the community because it was not in that condition for a while. Yeah, the community is actually outraged about it and very upset. But is that being grant funded, or how are we paying for that? It was funded through some additional funds in the grant already. So we've already paid for it. We've already got it installed. We're at the point where we're just monitoring it over the next couple weeks to ensure that it will take. The moment that we, God forbid, see something go wrong, our contractor is responsible for going to fix it within several hours, honestly. So I've already instructed them that I don't want to see another blade of grass die in that area. So we have taken the steps we need to and have installed the proper material at this point that I feel very confident in. Okay, thank you, Megan. Council Member King, anything? Thank you, Megan, for your presentation.

Council Member Green, thank you for letting the people know the great work happening in District C. But I also want to just give Ms. Cherie Austin a shout out for leading that initiative over on Claiborne. That area, although owned by the state and operated by the city, was a place of illegal dumping, trash, animals, vagrants. It was a site for sore eyes. And Ms. Cherie led the charge to making sure it becomes a positive for our city where it's a nice park, water retention area. So thank you for making that happen, Ms. Austin, you and the other residents of Tremaine. Thank you for that shout out. Council Member Green. Good work. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Up next? Up next is the millage presentation, the early childhood. So with that, you have early childhood and have civil service. So we'll be done and we look forward to seeing the council for the next seven days. Everybody do their stretches for tomorrow. It's public safety day. That's right. And bring your lunch. And also, obviously, we'll try to follow up on individual questions. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. Perfect. Hi, everyone. Good to see everyone. As we begin, we're really excited to be able to tell the story yet again of the success that we have seen as part of the early care and education millage that was passed in 2022. We are especially appreciative to the voters who made this happen, as well as the council and the administration, multiple administrations who have continued to invest in this work and given us such great support. We also want to just note that this has been something that we have worked with throughout multiple administrations. And so we're incredibly indebted to Dr. Evagno and her team for helping us maintain some of the success that we saw over the past couple of years. So this is a story that, as you all know, begins actually in 2017 when the city made the first municipal investment in early care and education for $750,000, which then many of you as part of this council then doubled and doubled and doubled so much, in fact, that we then were able to, in 2022, put this on the ballot. We are now in the fourth full year of execution of that millage. And each year we have seen a major initiative kind of launch as part of the suite of services and programs that are provided by it. This is a very large set of partners that work on this project. This includes 40 child care centers across the city. It includes nonprofit partners. It includes vendors that have launched as the result of this work. And it includes a number of folks who have now started to expand their services to include young children. They may have traditionally focused on youth development or K-12, but now are starting to focus in early care and education. As of today, we are serving 1,800 young people, infants and toddlers, as part of this work. 1,000 of them are supported by the early care and education millage, but we have successfully, for the fourth year in a row, been able to get those funds matched by the state of Louisiana one-to-one. And that additional $21.5 million has ensured that an additional 800 children are receiving care, full-day, full-year care. With those numbers, that actually means that now the millage and its matching funds are responsible for over 60% of the publicly funded seats in our network. With this data, I showed this last year and I'll continue to show it, New Orleans leads the state in the amount of young people who are being served by this work. We have 31% of our low-income toddlers and infants that are served by these publicly funded seats. The average in the state is 12%. Now, it's 31%, there's 69% of children who aren't being served, and so we'll continue to focus on getting as much access as we can. As many of you know, we have continued to evaluate this program and its success, both internally as well as externally and independently. And one thing that we are most excited to show is that we are seeing major improvements in early care and education in kindergarten readiness. What we have seen here is that our children are showing up in kindergarten performing better than the statewide average. And that really tracks alongside the major investments that this city has made. Not only are we performing higher, we are performing higher in every single demographic, regardless of race, socioeconomic status, disability status, or English language learner status. And that is true due to the work of our partners, of our child care centers who get up every day, and the tireless efforts of our team and our partners, many of which are here today. The 4-H child care partnerships that we have are located across all five districts. That is intentional because there is need across all five of our districts. And of that, you also know that a big portion of those funds not just cover seats and care during the day, but also restricts funding for wraparound supports or comprehensive services for the children who are participating. What that means is that we have been able to launch two major partnerships with partners, including Manning Family Children's Thrive Kids, as well as Tulane Tykes, to provide in-classroom supports for our children, families, and educators. As a result, nearly every child in our program received a vision screening, a developmental screening, and a hearing screening, which means they are getting these screenings earlier, which means we can provide them with the support they need. They can then intervene much faster. Of those children that were screened, over a quarter of them were immediately enrolled in care coordination. Some of them received intervention services, and some of them were actually referred to and then saw developmental pediatricians. We also saw almost 1,000 visits from our Tulane partners around Tulane mental health consultations, so really working with the educators, the families, and the children themselves to help regulate emotions and manage trauma and stress.

We have seen, in the past four years, an increase in the acuity of our children with exceptionalities and special needs who are enrolling in our program. This year, we launched a major initiative called the High Five Initiative. The High Five Initiative worked with six of the 40 child care centers where we saw high incidence of children with exceptionalities who needed additional support. Grants allowed them to hire full-time developmental support educators who could work alongside teachers in the classroom and work alongside children and their families to help ensure that the services that they were already receiving in classrooms and the care that they were receiving was the most effective. And the thing that was amazing about this is that one of the directors said, and I'll just read partially part of the quote, this is the first year that everybody on my team came back. So we're seeing byproducts of these types of interventions on educator retention. We are also in the third year of a partnership with the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority related to our child care facilities. Since 2022, we have partnered and provided $4.6 million to NORA to support not just new construction, but improvements to facilities, signage, enhancements, just a variety of things. And we'll talk a little bit about how that funding is going to change going in the future. We have also at Agenda provided nearly 2,000 hours of direct technical assistance to almost 130 child care centers, meaning we are helping them through the permitting process, the zoning issues, the licensing requirements. Three centers have launched since the start of this funding. So you note, many of you have been at their openings, two in District B, the Firehouse and Wilcox Academy, as well as Shiloh Gardens and Council District E in Holy Cross's neighborhood. And what's remarkable is two of those three are also integrating housing support as part of their work. So we're integrating child care with affordable housing, which we know continues to be a priority for the city. As I mentioned, we continue to do independent evaluations as required by the policy. cooperative endeavor agreement. I'm not going to read through everything, but I will say a couple of important statistics based on our findings for this year's program. 94% of our families reported that the city seats program improved their ability to work or go to school. 89% of our families would recommend their site to a friend or a family member. 77% of our Children are remaining from year to year from your one on 67% have retained going forward, and 97% of our directors participating said that their city seats program experience has been very positive. We have continued to invest in child care educators, which includes professional development, coaching training. We provided over 2000 hours of in classroom supports to help, you know, assist teachers and really developing their practice and getting really good at what they do. And we know that that's showing up in the progress that we're seeing with kids. 77% of our city seats directors said that of all of our supports, the in classroom coaching was by far had the greatest impact on their teachers, their teachers practices. We also launched a couple years ago now a wage enhancement program. As you know, child care owner, uh, educators are some of the lowest paid professions in the city and across the country. The average wage is $11 an hour. Now, as part of this work, we partner with our child care centers to ensure that they adopt the wage ordinance. And so we do have some progress there with respect to that. But we also provide retention bonuses for individuals to stay in the classroom. It is not uncommon prior to initiatives like this, that we would lose about 60% of our workforce from year to year. I'm happy to say that now we are seeing major retention work as part of this, and they are receiving these quarterly enhancements to essentially stay in the classroom. 90% of the teachers who were surveyed said that it reduced their stress levels, and 83% said that they would stay in the field as part of this. So we're happy to say that we are seeing major retention work as part of this. And just again, a couple of quotes. I often struggle with the idea of staying in child care because it's so hard to make ends meet. This last year, they helped me make me feel like I could stay in the early education, doing a job that I love. So going into this year, our priorities are first and foremost, this is a program that is effectively working. We have both internal data to suggest that we would love to continue to serve as many children as possible. We have over 5,000 kids that could be eligible for these types of programs, but cannot participate because we do not have funding for those seats. We also have over 50 child care centers that could also participate as part of this work, but cannot because we do not. Despite as much funding as we do have, it is very expensive to be able to provide full day, full year care. We will continue to focus on early literacy, which is really aligned with many of our state priorities around that. We will continue to work with Nora on facility improvements, but many to the last presentation, we are focusing very much on green infrastructure as well as lead abatement. Those are two areas that we know the administration has already been focused on where we feel like we can leverage our funding appropriately. Also, we're seeing that many of our child care centers are spending an astronomical amount of money each year on repairs related to not having permeable pavements or not having drainage in their child care centers. We will continue to have high accountability and maintain communication with the public, increase our ability to improve our data systems. Increased family support will be launching our parent cohort this year. And most importantly, try to maintain as much funding as we can at the state level.

As New Orleans has gone, the rest of the state has gone. And so with that, we are now seeing 17 communities across the excuse me, across the state who are now leveraging funding for that state matching fund. And so that does mean that our competition for those funds is now much higher than it was in the past. And so we'll need to work not just with the administration and our council and our legislature, but to ensure that our representatives know that we should be pushing to see that that state matching fund has as much funding and possible so that all parishes across the state who have done the same things we have to raise local funds will be able to participate. I'm going to turn it over to Janika Julian, my partner at NOLA Public Schools. Good afternoon. Can you come help me with the slides? I'm sorry. Excuse me. Can you come help me with the slides? I don't know why. While we're waiting for the technical info, does anybody have any questions for Jan? I just have an observation. Currently, you're at 4.39 mils? Correct. And that gains you about $24 million a year? It's about 21 and a half. I believe that number reflects. Yeah, it's about 21 and a half that we currently use. OK. All right. And then if your millage rolled forward to five, you'd get about $3.4 million in additional funding. How many more children could you help? So there's two things that that conditions on. The first is the amount of state matching funds. So right now, these are programs that operate together. If the state matching fund were reduced, we would have to take any increases to absorb the children who are already enrolled in our state matching funds program. But we would need to do another thing, which is also increase and augment the rate at which we are currently compensating our child care centers for these funds. Right now, it is not at market rate. So we would need to consider both of those things. Based on our modeling, we feel optimistic we could serve anywhere from 100 to 200 more children. It would come at the expense and the cost of reducing some other things within the budget. But we feel we could serve and we would serve more children as a result of the roll forward. So you could serve about 100 to 200 more children, but the demand is really like 5,000. Correct. So. OK, thank you. All right, sorry for the technical difficulty. At NOLA Public Schools, we have the pleasure of making sure that these kiddos get into seats through our coordinated enrollment process. And so here there are five strategies that we want to share about our enrollment and access that we provide for families through the coordinated enrollment process, through our AVAILA system, sorry. So one, family access and enrollment support is connecting those families to these opportunities through some of our events, our family resource centers, which includes application assistance, verification support and direct family navigation. And so we connect with a lot of our community partners around the city and bring the application process, you know, in those sites because we do realize that although our family resource centers are centrally located, in some cases families still experience barriers to being able to access those resource centers. But there we can start a new application, we can provide assistance with the verification and do direct outreach to priority neighborhoods and families. The second strategy is around enrollment operations and accountability. We want to make sure that we are strengthening our enrollment operations through application verification, quality control of those applications, monitoring of our eligibility, staff development and data informed performance management. And so how we do those is that we make sure that the documents that we're verifying, we're doing that with quality as well as accuracy. The early quality control and error correction, staff coaching, training and professional development. Compliance monitoring to protect public investment. So not only are we providing that access, we want to make sure that we're doing it in a great way and being accountable to make sure that we are actually passing the audits that come alongside the funding. The next thing is our technology and process improvement. Although our database system, which is called Available, is helping to streamline applications and improve verification and enrollment workflows, we continuously monitor the application, including the questions and the things that we're asking for. We do things like talk to our families as well as our stakeholders to find out if it's readable. Do they understand what it is we're asking for and what are the things that are preventing them from getting in the application in a timely manner. And so that's why we again went out into the community to provide that support because we want every family to be able to access the application and get across the finish line to submitting the application for enrollment. Next, we make sure that we're supporting our providers through training, onboarding and enrollment technical assistance, coordinating their outreach and ongoing engagement with early childhood and community partners. We know that oftentimes families trust community partners because they're going into that space and have not maybe came into our space yet. So we make sure that we're providing this information to the sites that provide services for families as well as community partners just to eliminate another barrier for families. And lastly, seat utilization and equitable access. Using our enrollment and demand data, we maximize publicly funded seats by doing targeted outreach, connecting with families to available opportunities and strengthening the equitable access across our city. And so we're constantly monitoring our application cycle. We have a main round application cycle as well as open enrollment cycle.

And we like to call it always open enrolling because if a seat becomes available, we are going to fill that seat. And so our application process is ongoing throughout the year to ensure that if any vacancies exist, that we're able to fill those seats in a timely manner. And our goal is that every publicly funded early childhood seat is accessible to any eligible family through this process and that it's equitable and family-centered throughout the system. All right. And so how we do these, again, I just wanted to give a little bit of data about some of the things that I talked about. For our community-based enrollment events, as I've stated, we go out in this community, but this year we did about, sorry, we started off with our end of our application cycle, we start off with our fair. It's a coordinated enrollment system fair where families are able to come out and they meet providers and community resources, unlike with our application process, you're not able to connect with a school or provider at that particular time. So we thought that it would be important that they can come on site. We're normally at McDonald 35 every year. This year will be January 9th, and they're able to walk up to a provider or school and ask them questions based upon the needs of their families. We this year had 21 total verification events and supported over 600 families, whether that was with application assistance or verification, as I talked about previously. We want to make sure that throughout this process, we are also building family trust. And so in our high satisfaction rating surveys that we've done, 83% of those families explained that their process was either good to excellence and 92.5% were very satisfied. So even though we're getting a high rating, we still contact families who do rate their experience at a tour below to talk to them about their concerns. And then that also aids in improving our overall satisfaction and our application process. We've expanded our family support by making sure that we have available live phone assistance and virtual support options so that if families can't come in for whatever reason, they have another avenue to reach out to us. 91% of our applicants who initiated an application either placed or successfully wait-listed, and then of those, 90% did receive their first choice placement. The next thing I want to talk about is within our system, we implemented two compliance managers on last year, but right now that is helping to strengthen our quality assurance and reduce our audit findings. We have successfully in the 25-26 school year had all of our funding sources without any audit findings, which then is going to be something that we're trying to make sure that we're doing moving forward. And what that means is not only are we filling the seats again, we are making sure that we are following all of the eligibility requirements for the various funding sources that we do offer. And we also make sure that we're pouring into our staff with professional development and skill building, as well as making sure that we're reinforcing our rigorous compliance framework to uphold all of those policy adherence that I spoke about earlier. We also have an engagement and enrollment campaign. You may see some of our billboards around the city, but we are thinking about ways that we can reach families who we are not already reaching. So be on the lookout for our Before You Know It campaign. We are going to highlight some of the journey of the kids who started in about three years ago in our campaigns from infancy through kindergarten. So we're excited that we're going to show a little bit of their journey and how they're being successful in their educational journey now. Lastly, this is the fiscal year budget for 2027. We have five categories of family enrollment and support, information and media campaign, family access, our data systems and support, and then fiscal administration and program support, which totals $1.5 million, with 100% indicated right here. Okay. Any questions? All right. Thank you so much for your presentation. Civil Service is up next. Thank you, Ashley. Good afternoon, Councilmembers. I'm Amy Trepannier, Civil Service Director, and I have with me today Tia Harrison and Robert Hagman for my staff. For our 2027 proposed budget, it's essentially a standstill budget from 2026. Our personnel costs are about $2.4 million. As Brandy spoke about earlier, that's a $26,000 increase from 2026, but that's due to an increase in the cost of fringes. It maintains our current staffing level of filled positions. We have a $1.5 million increase in our staffing. We have a $1.5 million increase in our staffing budget. We have a $1.5 million increase in our staffing budget. We have a $1.5 million increase in our staff positions. Other operating is also fixed at $509,364, and that is the same amount as we had in 2026. Okay. And the key components of our budget, as I said, it maintains our current filled staffing, and it eliminates two positions that are currently vacant. One of the positions actually has sort of been replaced by technology. When we went into the system, it eliminated the need for us to refill that position. So for our other operating, again, it's the same as 2026. Just to note, 92 percent of our other operating funds are essentially dedicated to two areas, either software or our disciplinary appeals process. About 63 percent of our budget goes to the different software programs that we use, and 29 percent goes to the disciplinary appeals process, and that's mostly for hearing examiners and court reporters. As you know, we use NeoGov for most of our human resource tracking, so we use different modules of that system for applicant tracking. It's our job portal. It's our learning management system, performance evaluations. It's online onboarding, electronic requisition routing. So we use that for a number of HR processes in city government across departments.

For our budgeting efficiencies from 2025 to 2026, essentially the biggest cut to our budget was that we did not get funded this year for public safety promotional testing, so that was a significant difference in our budget from 2025 to 2026, and again, that's not funded for 2027. Our rules do allow for those promotional eligibilists to stay in effect for up to five years with commission extension, and that is essentially what the commission has done for the existing eligibilists. The commission's extended them into 2027. For our 2027 goals, our first goal is to continue to work with the administration and the Civil Service Commission to revise civil service rules and processes to enhance efficiency, transparency, and fairness in the administration of the merit system. Every year, we bring forward a number of rule changes to move things forward in our system. We also want to sustain and monitor the efficiencies resulting from the mayor's hiring process improvement task force that we served on earlier this year. Some of those changes that we've made, we've gone to a per vacancy, per job posting system. Previously, we would post positions, collect applications, put people on eligible lists, and then when the departments had a need, we would give them the list. What that resulted in, while it gave an instant list of people, there were often people on the list who had applied months earlier and were no longer interested in the position. So, we've shifted to where the department files a requisition, it goes through the approval process, it's an actual budgeted vacancy, then we do the posting and create the eligibilist for that particular vacancy. So, much better in terms of the public knowing that it is for an actual seat in city government. One of the other efficiencies is we recertify the list of eligibles on a weekly basis, so we're constantly sending more qualified candidates to the departments, increase visibility for managers on those requisitions, we move the hiring freeze form to part of the requisitioning process, so that's electronic now, and then there's a mandate for departments to use our online electronic onboarding system as well for new employees. Another goal is to work with the departments to address critical vacancies through hiring rate increases, new classifications or minimum qualification changes. We want to partner, Rob and Tia's team will work with the departments to update job specifications to ensure they're accurately reflecting involving work requirements and organizational needs across city government and the Sewage and Water Board. Again, those job titles and the job specs are living documents, we want to make sure that those accurately reflect changes to the workforce, especially when you have increased incorporation of technology into jobs. Another thing that we've worked on this year and will continue to work on, when you don't have money to put forward to initiatives, you can still do enhanced training for the departments. So, this year we did a workshop for departmental leaderships on disciplinary training. We partnered with the law department and the business council gave us some assistance, really worked to train those departmental leaders on how to effectively enact discipline for employees in a way that's fair and stands up to any challenges. We also created a reference guide to all things civil service for directors and new directors so that they would have sort of a bible on how to work within our system effectively. It gives them a reference to say, okay, well, how do I do this in the system? How does this work? Developed that earlier this year. Next year, early in the year with the assistance of the business council, we hope to do a train-the-trainer session where, right now, we have about 25 individuals who serve as trainers in our employee growth and development program. They're employee trainers and we're going to bring in someone to assist with training the trainer for them on techniques for adult learners. So, to make that program better to effectively train our existing workforce is one of the things that we're working on early next year. Great. Any questions? Hearing none. No news is good news. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. And with that, we will adjourn. As I noted, public safety is tomorrow. Do your stretches. Bring your lunch. We will be here for a long time tomorrow. Bye. Bye.