2027 Proposed Budget Hearings - Day 2.

I don't get that many requests, but when I get them, I try to go and educate people about the dangers of drug abuse. Thank you. That's good that you mentioned that. And that's why I bring up those things, because I think people don't think to call the coroner's office. That's why we have these discussions, because you see things that, you know, PD sees them many times, individual officers. But as a collective, as one individual, you and your office see a lot more, and you can share stories with people who are in need. You know, we're part of the criminal justice system. I think people forget that, you know, that we're an active part. Everything starts with us. I mean, the whole criminal justice system begins at the coroner's office for practical purposes, and certainly as it relates to death, it all does. But again, I'm here, I'm trying to make myself available, but I must admit I don't get that many requests to see or speak. Well, maybe you'll get more now, because people don't know those things. They don't pay attention to that. So I appreciate that. Yeah, I am available. All right. I will try to make myself available at treaties and everything to speak about any of the aspects of the coroner's office, and particularly the various deep causes of strife associated with drug deaths. So. Okay. We do the best we can. I can promise you we will do the best we can. Okay. Council Member Willer. Thank you. Good morning, Mr. Coroner. It's good to see you. Yeah, yeah. I hope all is well. Just a couple of questions. So in your presentation, you talk about how you wanted to add, I believe, six FTEs, which was supposed to help reduce your reliance on overtime. Yes. Do you know how much you're slated to spend on overtime this year? I do not. You're not sure? Okay. We sent it into the city, the city would have those numbers. I do not know what you all are paying in overtime. I do not know. Where we are year to date is about $300,000. How much did you say? $300,000. Last year they came in at $800,000. Eight hundred. Okay. That's helpful. And Brandy, you might be able to help with this too. In the presentation you reference an adopted budget and a revised budget. What's the difference between those? Do you have that, Brandy? So the presentation about outside agencies are not completed by our office, so I'm not sure. Gotcha. Okay. Okay. Well, one of the things I wanted to talk about was some of the functions that you outsource in your office because I would imagine if you had more employees you would outsource less. So, let's see, like one thing you have listed is $1.3 million for professional services. Do you know what goes toward that? You're talking for me? Yeah, go ahead. Just some of those functions. Some outsources we have, outsourced, we have the vendors or for forensic psychiatrists, we have by law required to perform and issue coroner's emergency certificates at different hospitals, we get calls daily with those. So we have to, those are all contractors that we have to have by law. Is it per hospital? It's, we have four psychiatrists and they cover all the hospitals within our parish. Okay. And also private treating facilities. Okay. Yeah, I think people don't understand how much a part of what we do is our psychiatric work and we have to have contracted psychiatrists to go and do these coroner's commitments and OPCs, orders of protective custody and all of the things. Basically, the coroner's office is the centerpiece of this mental health department as it relates to we get calls all day, all around the clock, 24-7 and it's a big number, it's a big number. My last question, does the coroner's office provide expert witness testimony during trials? Unfortunately, I'm there all the time. Okay. So it's you? It's many times it's me and many times it's my psychiatrist. So it depends on what the district attorney. Particularly in older cases, I'm called to do, so I do provide expert testimony whenever I'm told to come and do it, yes. And if you have to get one of those forensic psychiatrists or psychologists in, does that, do you pay for that cost or does the DA's office cover it? Okay, so we have forensic pathologists that testify for the cases that they autopsied. Dr. McKenna fills in with his older cases and they didn't perform that autopsy. And I'm talking about in criminal cases with homicides, so they're in city employees, so that's part of our duties is to respond to those subpoenas in the testifying court. So the forensic pathologists that testify are city employees too? They're contractors and they rarely ever called for any testimony for any psychiatric trials or anything that may be needed. When I'm called, it's on murder trials. Okay. I'm, I would say all of them are murder trials. Okay. I'm providing the expert testimony. Okay. All right, thank you guys. Any other questions for the coroner? All right, thank you all for appearing today. Ashley up next. I don't have it, Mr. Morgan, but come on up and then we'll take it. If you could just stay for public comment. Sure. Mr. Morgan has a comment. Good morning to everybody in the house. This is a subject that I never came into, but a lot of people has asked me to address this. They say they had complaints and a fellow, Sanchez, he ignored the complaint. He's supposed to be the representative between the people in the police department and the people feel that he is covering enough for them. And also that the people is angry at Anne Colpatry. They are questioning why is she given many privileges? With all due respects, relative to this agenda, this subject is the coroner's office. What you are saying is not relevant. You can wait and take out a card when the police department makes their presentation. We have to follow some protocol. Okay. Well, then I apologize for this because I thought this was a police meeting. No. I apologize and I filled out a card and will address it. Thank you for the consideration. Thank you. You'll be first up, Mr.

Morgan, after the NOPD goes. Mr. Coroner, thank you for appearing. Thank you. You are done for the day. Thank you. Up next, we have the Public Safety Agencies and we're starting with the New Orleans Police Department. All right. And just some housekeeping. Number one, there are QR codes for all presentations at the front desk. And then if you have a card, a yellow card, please put it in the clear box over there so that we can get it and indicate what matter you want to speak on. Good morning. All of the agencies that fall under public safety were tasked with finding efficiencies and making reductions to get us through our 2027 budget. Today, each of them are going to do a presentation. They're all the executives are here, supported by their leadership team. Each of them will do a presentation to you about those efficiencies and those reductions. And then they'll all avail themselves to you for any questions that you may have. I will be here for the entirety to support them for any questions that may be beyond their scope. But thank you. Good morning. Start with the police department. Thank you. You may proceed. Yeah. Good morning, counsel. I'm Ann Kirkpatrick. Thank you for having us. Now, before we begin the day, I did want to tell you that I have a deep appreciation for what you're doing. You are trying to close the structural gap and the police department is going to be collaborative with you in meeting that goal. And so I thank the Mayor Moreno as well. These are Herculean efforts, but we are going to be a good player with you, as I said, to reach the goal. I will begin by addressing, if I may here, where we stand today with our own efficiencies, and that is reflected through our crime data. So we're going to show you what's important about this particular slide is when people call 911, they want to be serviced, they want to be serviced quickly. And so this is our response time over several years. So if you would look, the easiest way is to look at the left-hand column. Those are your years, 2021 through 2026. If you will note, it gives you the number of calls for service, and they have been pretty stable for the past five years. But the call response times are what show our efficiency. So back in 2021, we have, in the police department, our own structural gap, if you will, because back in the, several years ago, we were a department of 1,200, over 1,200 officers. Even years further back, you were 1,500. So in many ways, the structural gap for us was between losing 600 to 300 officers. But how have we been able to still serve the community with our own efficiencies? So in 2021, on the very right-hand side, year to date, our call for service response times, we are still matching in 2026, pardon me, what we did in 2021. And so that's just an example of our commitment to be as efficient and serving people as quickly as possible. Let's go to the violent crime trends. You know that this is made not only national news, but we have even been given a compliment on a global stage at the United Nations last week. Washington, D.C. and New York, I mean, excuse me, New Orleans were called out as being two of the cities that have had amazing drops in our crime. The top one murder from, as we all know, in 2022, New Orleans was the murder capital of the United States. Since 2022 to today, we have dropped our murders by 65%. And then you can go down the list here. Fatal shootings are down 67, nonfatal 62, and armed robbery 56. And lastly, carjackings are 66 below reduction. Again, with our own structural gap of having over 300 fewer officers than just several years ago. So what I will now do is turn it over to our comptroller. So to my left is Charlene Rollins. She is our comptroller in the police department. And she's going to walk you through the numbers. associated with our budget proposal to you. Go ahead, Ms. Rollins, you have the floor. Thank you, Superintendent, for that introduction. Council members, I am pleased to present the 2027 proposed budget versus the 2027 projected budget. This slide represents NOPD's proposed 2027 budget in comparison to the 2026 projected budget for general fund. NOPD's 2026 projected spend is expected to be $170 million by year end. Included are personnel expenses of $151 million, which consists of expected salaries, including fringe benefits estimated to the year end, which also includes estimated overtime and pension expenses. Other operating expenses are expected to end at $19 million, which is consistent with the 2026 adopted allocation. Using the projected 2026 year end spend on this slide instead of the 2026 projected allocation referenced in the slide is probably a more accurate comparison when considering the amount that should be presented for the 2027 proposed budget. The 2027 proposed budget consists of $150 million in personnel costs, in addition to $16.2 million in other operating costs, with a total proposed budget of $167 million, and I need to note, includes any required budget reductions in that number. The proposed, this proposed is a variance of $3.2 million primarily due to the net impact of both proposed reductions to other operating and personnel costs discussed in more detail in the next slide. The 2000-2027 proposed budget consists of $10 million in total reductions compared to 2027 budget requests. Reflected below are $2 million overtime and $4.3 million in proposed budgeted civilian staffing reductions, resulting in 62 full-time equivalent positions. As a result, NOPD's 2027 proposed budget includes 975 budgeted commissioned officers and 293 budgeted civilian employees. Key other operating reductions include 2.5 reductions reducing our annual payment for the Axon Agreement, which actually started at 5.5 in annual spend, and we're reducing it down to $3 million. Additionally, we propose a reduction of $1.3 million in current outsourced traffic investigation services.

We also propose an additional $452,000 in other operating reductions, and that's primarily due to savings we identified in our phone services. Next slide, please. Can I go back, please? I'm afraid I can't. No, you're good. The slide, the next slide, slide seven. No, I'm sorry. No, that's fine, yeah. This slide prevents the 2027 proposed budget versus the 2026 adopted budget for non-general fund expenses. The 2026 adopted budget for non-general funding expenses includes 17.8 million of personnel expense and 4.7 of other operating expenses for a total of 22.5 million. In 2027, we are proposing 17 million in personnel expenses and 3.4 in other operating expenses for a total of 20.9 million in non-general fund expenses. This resulted in a $1.6 million variance, and this is primarily due to ARPA funding ending in 2026, and we were able to offset it by 8.5 million in expected grant awards for the upcoming 2027 fiscal year. Next slide, thank you. The non-general fund, no, bring this. That's fine. Right here, yes, ma'am. The non-general fund request includes both recurring and new requests expected for the 2027 fiscal year. Personnel expenses, again, consist of 6.7, which is state supplemental pay allocation, French Quarter Development District Patrol, and if in comparing that to the budget book, that's gonna be rolled up into special revenues right there, okay? Also included is 6.3 in departmental justice community arts and policing services, which covers the reimbursement of possibly 50 salaries, full-time career sworn law enforcement officers. And again, that's gonna roll up into the federal fund section in the budget book. Other operating costs include the expected spend from the asset seizure funding, in addition to 2 million for the Department of Justice Bureau Assistance Grant, which actually provides funding for investigating, prosecuting sexual assaults in confinement facilities. And on this slide, it's important to note that we mentioned the most significant non-general fund ask, but if you were to compare that to the budget book, there is a lot more other smaller grants that rolls up, and we did that reconciliation, so we do have that list if you need to know what that is. The non-general fund recurring request also includes funding from Louisiana Highway Safety Commission, the Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement, and other justice grant awards. And I'll send it back to Ms. Chase. I'm actually gonna address overtime for us, and so this is our slide regarding overtime. Again, pardon me. On the left-hand side are actual spends that we have engaged in or spent this year. You can tell March, excuse me, the month of February is obviously tied to Mardi Gras. So more importantly is the slide on the right, and this was kind of a historical spend of overtime. The very left-hand bar chart actually has to do with the year 2022. Y'all, that was our COVID year, and that is why the spend was so low back in that time was because of the COVID year. I came in 2023. This was the transition year. I started at the fourth quarter of the 2023rd year. So there was transition going on at this time, and then the impact was right at the top of the year of 2024. Of course, that is the event of the Bourbon Street terrorist attack. We also had Super Bowl. We also had an unprecedented snowstorm. So that is why that particular overtime jumped the way it did in context through the history of how overtime is spent here. Last year, you may recall, and again, I want to thank this council. Something to note before I make my next remark, but the bar that is in gold, that was what you budgeted in overtime. So in 2024, there was not much actually in the budget for overtime. And then in 2025, there was no budget for the overtime. But in 2024, we spiked in the spend because of those unusual big events that occurred. Then in 20, last year, as I said, I wanted to thank y'all because you gave me a budget. And you said, we asked for 23 million, you gave us 23 million. And that is actually something that we are grateful for, that you did that for us. So we, through the good work of the assistant chief, we really managed according to that budget. But as an example, mid-year this year, we had to make an adjustment. Council and the administration said, we've got to cut that. And we were given a new overtime budget of 15 million. We have promised to be good stewards. And if you'll see the spin chart there, we have operated below that new adjusted budget you gave us of 15 million. So we just wanted to put all of that in context for you. But again, we thank you for trying to give us everything we have asked for. We recognize that. We're now gonna move to recruiting. And you know that this was a big, one of the top three goals we had when I came here. Recruiting, graduating in the consent decree, and reducing violent crime. We've turned the corner on the recruiting. These are your numbers to show that between last year and this year, we've had a 65% increase in the number of applicants. What really matters is that those applicants, who turns around and actually takes the test? So you gotta have a bigger pool, because from that pool are the ones who are gonna go and take the test and get into the actual process. We've had a 28% increase of those who are now test taking with us. So here are some of the, just kind of a bar chart to show that. And then let's, we will kind of start winding down here with our budget efficiency. We have been like every other department, we have looked at everything of where can we have efficiencies. We were willing to not have any, so to speak, sacred cows. So one of the first places we looked to were our contracts with outside vendors. And we started to look at those to identify potential savings if we did business differently.

Next, we hired a comptroller, who has really been a great compliment to Chief Landry and ourselves in handling the budget and the money and the business of running the police department. And then lastly, we have been able to maintain the efficiencies of driving crime continually to drop the violent crime rate. And we have done that with very good management of the overtime. So we will finalize our report to you by turning to the goals. So here, we will continue to expand on the strategies to reduce violent crime. We also, if you may recall, in May of this last year, we took on parking and towing. So it looked like we added 50 new civilians to our overall staff, but that was the roll over. We didn't go out and hire. We rolled over from one department to the next department. So we have seen great efficiencies having parking and towing as a part of our team. Then we have recently made a decision to address violent crime in terms of narcotics and the sale and really street level narcotics. And so we're standing up a permanent narcotics unit. Our pilot is in process as we speak. We are still pushing in and leaning in to the recruitment of officers and sworn staff. We'll have a goal of that 1,200. Today we were at 920, I believe 906. We are graduating a class this Friday. We will be adding 20 new police officers to our department. Our compliment to 926, effective Friday. And then lastly, we are going to restructure policies to ensure fair and impartial discipline. We have been moving toward that and have made some adjustments. And even yesterday I received some statistics from our PIB. Our complaints against our officers from the public have also dramatically dropped. And that's a good sign of health. And that's our presentation. And we're ready to answer any questions you may have. Thank you, Superintendent. First I want to congratulate you and your team, your officers, your commanders on the sharp decline in violent crime. It's not only NOPD, which I commend you for, but it's also things like Peacekeepers and LEAD that help keep violent crime down. So I want to congratulate you, but I also want to congratulate them and note that we need to keep investing in those programs. So thank you for that. I do want to say congratulations on the comptroller. I think it was much needed. Brandi, I'm going to probably need some information from you on actuals because we looked at 2024 budgeted numbers at $156.8 million. 2025 budgeted was $149.4 million. 2026 was $164.3 million. And then this proposed 2027 budget is $167 million. So if we look at the delta in 2024, if you subtract the 2027 proposed budget from that 2024 number, we're at an additional $11 million. If you look at the 2025 numbers compared to what's proposed, it's over $18 million more. And then the 2026 is $3 million more. So can we get those actuals from you from 2024, 2025, and up to now in 2026? You're looking for general fund only? Looking for everything. I think we need to compare apples to apples with what we're looking at here. I do want to talk about the combination of parking and towing to NOPD. I think that was a good move. But I also understand that when we did that move, of the 71 individuals who transferred, at least 15 people were not actually in active status. So can you explain a little bit about that? I cannot. You want to speak to that? Can anyone speak to it? Can you rephrase that again? Sure. Of the 71 people who transferred from parking enforcement, at least 15 were not actually in active status. There was one person who was deceased, two had resigned. So can you tell us how you figured out where those 15 people ended up, and was that budget transferred over for those people who were not actually active? To actually answer your question, we didn't receive a budget from parking and towing. I'm sorry, we got it very slow. Do you know what it was? You did, actually. You got $3.5 million more when we transferred. Those positions we tried to fill, I think we hired some new tow truck drivers. The reason we haven't been able to fill them as much as we could is because it's really hard for some people to pass our background check. So we're looking into fixing some of that. But as far as those personnel, we actually did hire more tow truck drivers, and actually I think we hired some more parking people, too. So where they ended up, I have no idea as far as civil service, but that wasn't something we had to address at the time. Do you know how many actual full-time employees who work in parking enforcement and towing right now? Do you have that number? No, I don't, but we can get you that number. Please do. Okay. I want to turn to slide number eight. Hold on a second, Councilwoman. I'm being told it's 59 right now. You have 59? We have 59. And we've hired four new tow truck drivers as a result of losing six that did not transfer over to us, and we're in the process of continuing to hire. Okay. Yes. And if I may, just to put a little context to why some were not able to transfer. Our criminal justice databases and access to the criminal justice database is governed by requirements of who may have access. So when we say someone didn't pass a background, we're basically saying we would not be able to have brought them. You weren't able to onboard them because they're coming into law enforcement rather than just general parking? That's correct. Got it. Okay. So the $2.5 million on slide number eight that are covered by the French Quarter Development District Patrol, do you know what services are covered under that? Supplemental patrols. That's the supplemental police patrols for the 8th District. Okay. And then the $6.3 million DOJ Community Oriented Policing Services grant, what does that cover? That covers the possible reimbursement of 50 police officers, sworn police officers. Okay. And that's grant funded, right? Yes. That's grant funded. Okay.

Slide number six talks about a $1.3 million elimination of traffic investigative services contract. That's the people who come on scene after there's a car accident. Yes, ma'am. What is the elimination of that contract? How will it impact calls for service and sworn officers? Right. With respect to potential, we value alternative responses to crashes, you know, rather than having a full-fledged police officer. We would have to pick up that work internally with respect to patrol officers responding to those crashes. However, I have mentioned before that looking at doing business differently, there are other models out there, such as in Memphis, called a police support technician model, where it's actually done in-house, but by civilian staff who become a pipeline to become police officers, but they begin in a police service support status, and they are the ones who respond to the crashes. The goal is the same. Alternative responses to crashes are very efficient and effective. How you get there will be a decision of yours and the administration. Okay. Are we using state police at all to respond to accidents on the highways? Because I know from years past, for example, the 6th District would have to take police officers off of patrol to respond to accidents on the overpass or state highways. Are we using state police to investigate any of those crashes? When I first got here, that was kind of a foreign thing to me, to be honest with you. I was quite surprised. I did look into it. My understanding is that that is an agreement that was made between the state and the locals, and it's not apparently just New Orleans, but here in this state, apparently state police does not handle traffic accidents on the interstate, which is very foreign to me. It's foreign to us, too, so maybe we can try to work with our state troopers to see if they can respond. All I can tell you is that I did try to do some due diligence on that, and that will, I believe, be a little above my situation. Maybe from the city administration or the council could take that lead. Understood. On slide number six, there's a $2.5 million reduction to Axon. What is Axon, and what is the effect of that reduction? Sure. So, Axon is the vendor who we contract for our body-worn cameras, our tasers, and in-car cameras, so that would be a reduction associated with negotiating that contract. Is it a reduction or elimination? It would be a reduction. Okay. So, for instance, right now, and under the consent, every officer who puts a uniform on or goes into the public would have to put a camera on. The reduction would mean, for instance, detectives would no longer have to put a camera on type of thing. We would have fewer cameras for that type of thing, so it's a reduction, and that would be the type of impact. Okay, but not elimination? It's not an elimination, no. I do want to talk, before I turn it over to my colleagues, about something that I'm really passionate about, which is the crime lab. Can you talk about the budget for retrofitting the crime lab and also for personnel, and is that included in this budget? It is not included in the budget. Would you like to address that, Deputy Mayor, or actually, and we have the chief, Gernon, who's over the crime lab. Yeah, thank you. We met with the leadership of the crime lab, and to my understanding, the retrofit is about a $9 million cost, and so that is not reflected inside the police department's budget, but the mayor and I met with the entire ... leadership of what that looks like and how long that would take to do. And so I know that they have moved forward with the experts to lead and run and do the DNA testing. It's a separate question of how and when and how much for the retrofit. Right. We could use capital funding for the retrofit versus operating or general fund money. We did have that meeting. I think those conversations are still ongoing. Okay. Just keep me updated on that because I do think it's important having our own DNA testing ability actually could bring us in some revenue because we could take in tests from other parishes much like the state and it would eliminate our need to outsource DNA testing which we do right now. How is our DNA backlog? I'm going to have Chief Garnon speak to specifics about our lab since he's over it. Okay. Thank you. Good morning, Councilwoman. Good morning. We know that you're really focused on this and we appreciate it and I just want to remind you guys that a few months ago you actually authorized those CODIS positions and so we have the CODIS administrator which is a very highly specialized, highly technical position. That guy is actually onboarding December 1st. We're talking about in the entire nation we had two applicants and only one of them fit our criteria. We had the thing open for a year and we only found one person. So it's a big win for us, the fact that we were able to get him hired. He's moving here from Illinois. It's a big deal. As far as the backlog, our backlog right now is pretty minimal. When should I just correct that to specifically resulting to sexual assault kits. That's really where we're talking about when we talk about backlog. A lot of the other things, car burglaries, things like that are lesser priority. But those sexual assault kits are brought up almost weekly. So if a sexual assault happens this week, it will be brought up next Tuesday. The State Police Crime Lab, though, is going to be moving at the end of the year. We know that that combined with the using up of that $4 million that the Council allocated to DNA testing, that money is going to run out by the end of the year as well. So we're going to probably start to see some backlog again at the State Police because they're not going to be able to outsource anymore.

But we will have to work through that when it comes up to see, A, what is their new capacity as they're in a move, and then B, what is the new capacity as that money that you guys allocated dries up? Okay, yeah. Let's work together on that to make sure that we are counting and keeping track of the backlog as I know you are and Dr. Kelly is. There was some state money that Representative Landry got to help with the backlog, so maybe we could tap her again to get some state funding given our current financial crisis. So thank you for your work and thank you for your attention to this, you as well, Superintendent. It's really important. And again, it could be a cost-benefit center if we get the CNA lab up and running. Thank you. Thank you. All right. I don't see any buttons pushed for speaking. I know, it's not. All right. Council Member McCarran. Thank you. Thank you, Chief, for being here in this presentation. I want to touch back on on-scene services. I understand the need to try and bring things in-house. We talk about that all the time, especially in DPW. But for example, with DPW, we have outside contracts, but we're hiring in-house staff. So in the meantime, we've got to keep these contracts so services do not fall short. So can you talk about the impact of if we do not, if we just cut on-scene services in January, what does that look like for people? Are we going back to six-hour wait times? And then what would be the plan to hire additional staff or figure out, you know, it almost seems like we're putting the cart before the horse to say we're going to cut this contract and then we don't really have a plan for backup? Right. We've been talking about what that plan would be. So if the council and the administration says, Chief Kirkpatrick, NOPD, build an in-house what I'm going to call, for sake of terminology, PST, a police support technician program, from that green light of go, it would be about three months because we would need to hire 10 people to serve in that capacity and we would first start with in-house people already in existing seats to see if they would like to serve in that capacity. But we believe it would be about a three-month startup from the word go to do we have people in cars, you have to get cars, you have to get uniforms, you have to have some training, and so all of that we factor as a three-month plan, but that's in the meantime, the second part of that question is what do you do immediately if the contract does not continue? If that is the decision of the council or the administration to not go forward, we have to service that. That would be with the existing platoon officers and patrol. They will have to go service those. And that becomes in the queue as any other 911 call. So that would be, now, we are committed to whatever this decision of our community says. We are going to do everything to maintain efficient services, but that is the impact. We would be doing that from the platoon. Have we done a full analysis on the cost-benefit or whether there is a cost-benefit to stand up our own program? Do we have that data that you can supply to us versus continuing on-scene services? We built out with that data on a basis of ten people, and I believe that Stephanie might have it directly, Chief Landry, but it's around $650,000, but, Chief, I know you did the analysis. That doesn't count all the supplies and equipment. It's only for hiring the people to run the program, and also we had vehicles that were available to infuse into the program. The only thing that we would really need is approval to move forward with personnel costs. And so can you guys, can you put it on like a piece of paper and a report for us to show? Yes. Looking forward to that information. Yeah, I mean, I think we'd like to see that and really understand on whether or not this Absolutely. Okay. Thank you. Absolutely. We've got that already kind of done. We'll just package it in a formal way to send to you. Okay. I want to talk a little bit about some of the FTEs that are being reduced. Specifically, there's a couple different sections of this. You've got a reduction in field operations, and then are any of these reductions, I know in chapter 90 of the code, there's certain positions that are required by law, for example, in the crime lab and PIB and force investigations, training academy. Are any of those personnel being cut? Are they going to affect any of those laws? We'll follow all mandated laws in terms of personnel who are mandated. They would not be a consideration for a reduction. Okay. Would you provide that list to the council if you have it? Yes, ma'am. We'll provide that for you. What about in the 40 FTEs and field operations? Are those civilian operations or what? All of the potential, and I want to underscore, yes, there would be professional staff, which means they are not sworn. And I do want to underscore, we value our professional staff. We do that. But all of the proposed cuts would be in the professional staff units. Okay. And how would that affect sworn officers and their responsibilities if they lost civilian staff? Yes. The work doesn't go away. The work is still there. And so it would be subsumed by sworn staff and any other redirections of our current professional staff to see if there's additional work that they could take on. But those would be the only options because the work doesn't go away unless we can look at doing work differently. And I think we've proven that we know how to look at problems differently, even in the crime fight. We've proven that we know how to address things from a different set of eyes. Could you kind of provide just a breakdown of, not right now, but to the council, an overview of what responsibilities would be eliminated from those civilian staff and have to go on to sworn officers? Yes, ma'am. I can provide all of that for you. Okay. Thank you. I think we talked about the Exxon. Okay.

And then the Crime Lab, I know briefly you talked about in the budget book, it shows a reduction from 53 to two FTEs. Did those positions just get moved under a different section or is that not accurate? It's not. Yeah. There's movement in that book, so it wasn't a true reduction. They were just moved in different maybe cost centers. Okay. And are all the people that are working in the Crime Lab, since I know we can't process DNA at this time due to the building, but we've hired people to try and process DNA once we get accreditation, are people cross-trained in evidence processing or how does that? Chief Garnett, do you want to address that for us, please? I believe that that is the goal. Probably not, especially with those DNA analysts. There's such a specialized training and there's such a high level of skill needed that they are currently right now developing the systems, protocols, procedures, so that once we do get the physical infrastructure in place, they can kind of plug in those procedures. But it would not be a good idea to cross-train them on other things because that's just not their skill set. And I think that that would create a lot of unintended negative consequences. Okay. Understood. Just checking. What about, my last question is, the training academy, you guys were moving to a new building. Have you moved to a new building? Yes, ma'am. We have moved into the building, but everything is a temporary move until everything is dotted and signed off. And I know the CEA has been making its way through the necessary channels, but we are there and we're still, we would say for our sake, we're temporarily there until the deal is done. But we have moved in. Okay. Thank you. Council Member Morrell. Thank you. Good morning, Chief. Good morning, members. A lot of my questions have been asked, but I kind of need some finer information. So, what is the total amount within the NOPD budget that's attributed to towing and parking enforcement? There was two transfers. Initially, in the 2027 budget, we got a contract portion, which was like $4.3 million, and then we got another personnel transfer, which she mentioned earlier, which was like right about $3.5 million. So, that was the transfer. The 4.3 was in the budget initially at the 2027 year, and then additional transfer a few months ago at 3.5. Okay. So, just for clarification, because I know there is heightened scrutiny when it comes to NOPD budget. In your existing budget, roughly $8.6 million is actually parking and towing enforcement. Correct. Okay. Just want to make sure that I have that number free and clear. All right. And I know you expressed this previously when we met when the transfer was taking place. Obviously, there are some concerns because of NCIC. You guys cannot have people who are inside of law enforcement who don't meet the background check because they could have potentially access to sensitive information, and that has restricted your ability to get normal towing people. I do think that that was a foreseeable problem, and it's probably a headache that you're going to have for an extended period of time just because I don't see how we can compromise our NCIC status by ever letting anyone who can't pass a background check be in our law enforcement offices. So, I do think it's a challenge, something we're going to have to account for, and it may require you to come back to the council and look at the salaries and the like for the people that we're hiring for those positions. So, I want to get to you to have that dialogue because I can tell you that one of the things that we really wanted y'all to address, and you've done it, particularly in the French Quarter and CBD, is nighttime towing. Because as you know previously, when parking enforcement was under DPW, there really wasn't nighttime towing. There was towing during the daytime, but many people in parking enforcement and towing were not comfortable and were frankly scared to confront owners of vehicles and tow them at night. And as you know, we get a significant amount of calls from people throughout the city just for that purpose. So, I think the move of parking and towing enforcement to NOPD was the appropriate one. It's just that's a growing pain we're going to have to work through because I do think, not to sound ghoulish, but that's a lot of revenue left on the table when you see the tremendous amount of illegal parking that happens throughout the entire CBD and French Quarter area at night. And there are significant safety concerns because when many people park at the corner illegally, it prevents law enforcement and fire from navigating the narrow streets of the quarter. So we need you to get those towing positions filled as soon as possible and to make sure we clear those areas as soon as possible. I want to follow up with what Councilmember Harris and Councilmember McCarran said regarding OSS. I think that our pivot to using a civilian contractor to do the on-site services was an important part of lowering response time. I do think it's going to have to be a cooperative conversation between now and the end of budget how we address the issue. I will say that I do think, when have we last competitively bidded that service? I'm going to let Chief Landry speak to that. I think the last competitive bid was like in 2018, 2019. I would certainly say that if we're looking to reduce costs, something you might want to consider is competitively bidding the service. We have considered that. It was on the table and we're working with the administration about what direction we're going to go in. Right, because it could be something that as we're going into the next fiscal year, I think that the Council could be more comfortable if we set a number for it, competitively bid it to try and get it below that number, and then that would be the compromise to try and fund that budget.

I do think that it would be a tremendous self-owned, self-goal, horrible position to be in if we were to not continue on-site services, if we saw call time creep back up to those terrifying levels in 2022 and 2023 where people were having to wait two, three hours for response time because once an officer is already on scene doing a police report for a car wreck, if they're needed somewhere else, they have to transition to somewhere else. So I think that is something we're going to have to work cooperatively to find a solution and re-bidding that contract to see who else is out there to get that cost down could help us with the budget. When it comes to recruitment, are we still working with the Police and Justice Foundation at all in any capacity? No, we're not. Okay, I just want to say that because the recruitment numbers are impressive, so I applaud y'all for taking that in-house and having a plan to build that up because when you look at your recruitment numbers and transferring those people who are applicants to then become test takers, we did a lot of work as a council working with you to remove barriers to get those individuals who are an applicant to get to the test. We did remote testing locations, we've done a lot of things to get there and I appreciate that seeing some dividends because we have to be able to have recruitment outpace attrition and that was a problem for multiple years and I don't know if we're quite there yet, but it's heartening to see we're getting there. Yes, we're getting there and it's a work in progress and it's because of the group that we have, Captain Nolan and Dr. Green who's heading it. Very good. And their team has been excellent, so they've done a good job. And I want to compare, we have slide 5 which talks about the reduction of 62 civilian FTEs. Compare it with slide on page 15 which says we've eliminated 68 positions. So just for the math, that means out of the 68 positions being eliminated, 62 of those are civilian FTEs, correct? No, that's just, the 68 actually represents positions and that's converted, the 62 is FTEs. So that's the difference. One is actual true positions and it's because some of those positions are not full time and it's converted to actually 62 FTEs. So the 68 and 62 are the same number, it's just some of those, okay. It's because based upon the slide presentation, so as you know, the public is following what we're doing and I want to be very clear with the numbers because I don't want someone to look at your slide show, look at the budget book, see a discrepancy and say that this is something nefarious. So I think it's important to, let's hit that again. So an FTE is full time equivalent, which means that sometimes when you have multiple part time positions, they are combined to make full time equivalent positions. So though slide 5 shows that we're eliminating 62 full time equivalent, the listed positions that are being reduced show 68, that's because some of those 68 are part time positions combined to create one FTE. That's correct. Okay. All right. I want to talk about Office of Secondary Employment. I think that you were not here when Office of Secondary Employment was created, Chief Kirkpatrick, Chief Harrison was, and I would argue, and I was not on the council obviously when it was created, the stated purpose of the Office of Secondary Employment was to remove the aorta of corruption in regards to details and overtime and the like. I would argue based upon what has happened over several years, that has been an abject failure. The reason why I bring it up is not to dance on the grave of OPSC, but to talk about opportunities for the police department to self generate revenue. Office of Secondary Employment, they charge an amount over the detail cost per hour to operate the office. Almost every other law enforcement agency in our region does their details in house. Something that I know I've talked to both Chief Harrison and Chief Kirkpatrick about is that when you look at a lot of the accusations regarding double billing, if you simply were in the same recording system, it would be impossible to double bill. For those of you who don't know, our city accounting system is ADP. ADP, love it or hate it, is the same system used throughout corporations and hospitals in the United States. Simply put, if you try to input the same time for the same hour, the system kicks it out. You literally cannot do it. The fact that we have a decentralized detail system separate from a centralized overtime system, we are literally creating the problem that continues to perpetuate problems. I bring this up because if we were to bring Office of Secondary Employment in house and eliminate it, the money that is charged to run the Office of Secondary Employment would become general fund and OPD dollars. On top of that, and I want to highlight this, I want to correct myself, I was wrong about the uniforms. It's not the color, it's the pocket that makes it expensive. So I was corrected by officers. I want to own that when I make a mistake. But what I want to highlight is that there is a huge discrepancy in what we do with NOPD and uniforms versus other jurisdictions. We provide a stipend, I believe it's $750 a year, roughly, is that correct? That's correct. The boots for a traffic cop are $400. The belt for a cop, what is the belt for a cop on? Your utility belt? It can be about almost $100. This adds up very quickly. I'll use Jefferson Parish as a comparison. All of your equipment in Jefferson Parish is provided by the Sheriff's Office. I know that many of our recruits buy their uniforms while they're in the academy.

When you look at these little things that kind of nickel and dime as barriers to entry and to being in NOPD, I think that the quartermaster system used by other departments is that the money that's generated from things like details, they take a portion of that money, they pre-buy uniforms and equipment, and they give you that equipment. Because the reality is that when you're doing details in overtime, with the equipment that you're paying for out of your pocket while the city is taking money off the top of that time, that doesn't really sit right with me. I think that if we want to be a professional law enforcement institution, we need to provide the equipment to our officers and provide replacement equipment for on-the-job damage. So I really, I know I've talked to Chief Harrison and Chief Krabachnik about it previously, I really want to move this forward. I think that if we bring everything in-house, then we can actually have self-generated funds to offset and create other opportunities for NOPD to grow its own money and put less pressure on the general fund for things like OSS, because easily, if we brought that in-house, you could cover OSS and we wouldn't have to go and find some other part. I mean, to Councilman Harris' point, we don't want to have to rescue NOPD at the expense of peace ambassadors or other things that are happening to augment and lower how we fight crime. Because all those things together, funding JJIC appropriately, funding Ubuntu Village, all these different things, they all work together to keep our crime rate low. It's why we're a national model right now. You can't fund one piece of that network and defund the other, whether it's OSS responding to simple car wrecks, whether it's our violence intervention specialists who are going in neighborhoods to make sure they're not retaliatory killings. If you unfund any single piece of that, the whole thing stops working. So we have to find ways to make NOPD more self-sufficient, and I think that we're going to have to have a very forward-facing, transparent conversation on how we eliminate things that have not worked and generate more revenue for NOPD to provide more opportunities for officers to actually have equipment not at their cost, generate revenue for the department, and also just have better outcomes because with one centralized system, you don't have all this miscommunication that happens that either, A, allows for bad things to happen or, B, allows for the appearance of bad things happening and NOPD having to spend a tremendous amount of time and effort with respect there trying to explain why the numbers don't line up the way they line up and the hours don't line up the way they line up. This needs to be streamlined. It never has been done. So I will work with y'all diligently. I think that if we all decide to do this together, it can be done expeditiously, maybe not before we finish this year's budget, but certainly it could affect midyear cuts or midyear changes next year. So I'm just putting this on the table. It's something that we absolutely need to do. And I want you guys to work with me in getting it done. That's all I got. What, y'all want to respond to any of that? Chief Harrison? Yeah. Thank you for that. And I think I will. Historically, we have always had conversations, long before I was the chief, when I was the chief, and even leading up to today, we've always had the conversations of what is the most efficient and effective way to make any of these decisions. The administration does not disagree with you that we should be having these conversations about efficiency, both with operations and with costs. So we are absolutely willing to have the conversation about, let's look at what's the most effective and efficient way to do this. But the decisions have always been beyond the authority and scope of the police chief, historically. Thank you for inviting the chief into the conversation. We will bring this back to the administration and are certainly willing to have those conversations with you. Okay. Thank you. That's all I have. Thank you. Council Member Willard. All right. Good morning, everyone. Good to see you guys. First, I want to thank you for the work that you've been doing this year. Crime stats continue going in the same direction. It's positive. The city's safer. I think people feel overall safer in the city of New Orleans. One of the knocks against us is that sometimes we're not our best champion. So that's a message that we need to get out there in the community. Because if you go up to Baton Rouge during a legislative session, they still ask, is it okay? My daughter wants to go to Tulane. Is she going to be okay at Tulane? Historically, we're at one of the safest moments in our city's history. So thank you for everything that y'all have been doing. And thank you for working with the council and the administration on the overtime, because that was a huge cost driver for us. And it looks like you're going to come under budget this year with the overtime that you've been allocated. A few things that I wanted to go over. So we talked about OSS and the 62 FTEs that are being reduced, eliminated. Those are all administrative, non-BRSS positions, correct? They're non-sworn. Non-sworn. Non-professional staff members. What areas are those covering, as far as operations go? They're going to be all across the board, almost in every division of our department. And everyone on our team, we said we are going to work with the council to meet our goals. And everyone came to the table, all the chiefs, the majors. And we said, this is what we can present. It's not easy, just like your decisions are going to be easy. But everyone. So we'll have some impacts. It sounds like from the council members up here today, the one that is the toughest to swallow is going to be OSS and the civilians reporting to the traffic incidents. I recall my mom had a pretty bad accident around 2022.

She waited for somebody to arrive on the scene for about two hours and nobody came. So she just left. I think she went to urgent care because she was actually in pain. We can't go back to those days. So I think collectively we have to figure something out. The flip side is, you know, if we eliminate that contract or don't come up with another alternative, as you mentioned, we're going to be pulling officers off of patrol to respond to those scenes. And that's not ideal either right now. We have to have an alternative how we get there and what that alternative is as a collective decision. But having an alternative, we've got to have an alternative. All right. So first I'll start off with the Office of Superintendent, your budget. It looks like it's being reduced. You had a funding from the U.S. Treasury Department. It looks like that funding is being reduced to zero. You got $7 million. What is that? That was the ending of the ARPA funding. That was the end of the ARPA funding. Okay. And so now it's being supplanted by general fund dollars? Some other... Some other funds have gone. Most of those costs, some of them we had to take in-house, but again, we tried to pursue other grant opportunities to actually reduce some of that funding loss. Okay. Okay. And then in the same line right there, it looks like we have budgeted $1.8 million for retention and $1.8 for terminal leave. Is that accurate? That's correct. How did we pin down those numbers? I'm going to have to defer to the budget office for those. Okay, so that came from the budget office? Those numbers came from our Office of Performance and Accountability. They had data and trends to get us to those numbers, yes. Okay. And it looks like there was a discrepancy between the slide deck that you had and the budget book as it relates to FTEs. The budget book had $1,330, and then in your slide presentation, it had $1,268. That would be after the reduction. So currently, we're budgeted for, like, 2027 had $1,330, but this slide shows the impact after the reductions. That's the difference. So you want it to get to $1,330? No, that's where we started. Oh, that's what your reduction is? We started at $1,330. Okay. And then after the reductions, we would be at the $1,268. Gotcha. So that's for the non-sworn reductions right there? Yes. All right. Moving on to operations, what is the DOJ seizure division responsible for? There's an earmark of $500,000 for supplies, equipment, training right there. That's the asset seizure funds. That's another one in those special revenue funds on one of those slides. I think I talked about it on the slide. It's a total of $800,000. There's a state and federal portion, and that's the asset seizure funds. That's the equitable sharing program that the office gets as a result of confiscated funds and participating in those type of joint operations. Okay. And then the police seizure fund? That's all the same. Like, they have one that's quoted $500,000. There's, like, a state portion. Police seizures, $300,000. Yes. So is that... That's as old as $800,000. Is that coming from general fund? No, no. That's actually... That's federal and state as well? Federal, yes. Okay. That's federal. Okay. The crime lab budget looks like there was funding in there for convention and travel expenses. Is that still in there? $70,000? If it's still in the 2027 line, it's still there. All those are still represented there, yes. Okay. I mean, across the board, we've been asking departments and agencies not to do... Chief, you want to... Yeah. There are certain things that are required for certifications. Gotcha. And those things that make... Cause for people to retain their employment and retain their certification, we have to do that. That is the only... That's the only travel that's been put in there. Okay. So it's more so required. Right. It's absolutely required for job security and performance. Okay. All right. Moving on to some questions on the contract side. It looks like you have a $750,000 contract for cell phones. Have we looked at changing providers for lower costs on there? Same on the janitorial services. Okay. So on the cell phones, we have been negotiating with T-Mobile versus Verizon. Verizon has always been a great partner. During Katrina, they were the only ones that were still operating and gave us the connectivity. So we have negotiated with them and the bill will be lowered to $300,000 this year. Okay. For 2027. Okay. $300,000. Okay. Yes. What about on the janitorial services? It comes out of the property management budget and once they are completed, I guess they're contractual. Are they doing the RFP this year, Randy? Do you know? Okay. I'm not sure if they're going to do an RFP with the new transition of a new director. However, it's driven by their department, and we just utilize their trade agreement. Okay. $450,000 for electronic citations. What is that? What are those electronic citations? Is that a system? Yeah, that's actually a system for writing out tickets digitally and sending it to the system. Okay. So that's for a system. All right. This one caught my eye, and this will be the last thing that I have. We have a contract with Salesforce? What's that for? I mean, I know Salesforce is a CRM. We utilize Salesforce for recruitment purposes. It's our new vendor that we interface with our ESOF in order to hire our recruits. Okay. Have we looked at other options? I mean, I just know from private sector, Salesforce is very expensive. It is, and we have been in negotiations with them, but for right now, it has stabilized our recruitment efforts. Gotcha. So that's been part of the increase in those recruitment efforts? That's correct. Is it more so for like targeting and marketing? Yes, it is. Okay. That makes sense. All right. Thank you all so much. Thank you. Council Member Green. I'd like to ask my questions after public comment. We only have three comment cards. The first up, as promised, is Mr. Larry Morgan.

And as Mr. Morgan is coming up, following him would be Edith Romero, followed by Sarah Whittington. Whittinghorn? Whittington. Good morning to everybody in the house. Man, I'm looking at all these figures in the millions, and I, the black community feel that a big percentage of the service are not rendered to them. I'm wondering if that's reality, because your councils, that our people after America put you in office, you have to serve the people. And you talk about a budget, it's a lot of money, a lot, a lot, a lot of money. And what is sad, look at the police department. They was giving a lot of money. They was giving each other big raises, buying extensive jewelry. All that was going on, on Aunt Co-Patriot's watch. That shit had never could exist. If she was good government, and governing a system, and governing the people under her, the children that was killed in the French Quarter tragedy, no, by their father, should have never happened. If she was good in her line of work, where she claimed that she had 36 years on the French Quarter tragedy, should have never happened. But yet, y'all kept y'all on. Y'all fired Woodstock, when Woodstock was doing the job, because she was black. But yet Aunt Co-Patriot, all the people that was killed under her watch, she still exists today drawing a check on the taxpayer's money. And yet, what made me mad, is you black candidate, come and talk about the neighborhood of unsupplied gold. You got your back on the people. Mr. Morgan, that's your time. Edith Romero, followed by Sarah Whittington. Thank you so much. Yes. So my name is Edith Romero. I'm here representing Iron Surveillance, and I want to first start saying thank you so much, Council Member Harris, Council Member McCarran, and Council Member Willard, because you've really asked the important questions. I've been cracking my head for the last few weeks, and I have the privilege of knowing people in the Big Easy Budget Coalition that helped me understand the budget, but this is not accessible to the people of New Orleans, and the people of New Orleans have a right to understand where the city's money is going to, especially the police, that makes up the biggest chunk of the budget. Looking at the presentation, you can't see it, but as Council Member Harris said, there is an increase of at least $3 million from last year. I was very confused, because in the budget meeting with the mayor at Council Member McCarran's district, she mentioned that there was going to be a decrease, and that is not what I'm seeing in the numbers. So I do encourage NOPD to be more transparent about their budget. I think the people of New Orleans deserve to know where funding is going to when it comes to overtime, what districts, what officers are accruing overtime. I was just reading a report from the OIG about an officer that clocked in 2,000 hours review red light tickets, and they found out that it was actually just 100 hours. So this is where our money is going to. We know that overtime was a huge chunk of the money that went last year, and that got us to this place of a budget deficit. I also want to ask for more transparency on the overtime that is being spent using surveillance, gen tech cameras, the police drones as well. And I want to advocate for this funding to actually go to community resources that actually can make our community safe. Thank you. Thank you. Sarah Whittington. Good morning. Sarah Whittington with the ACLU of Louisiana. Again, I'd like to thank the council members that asked for transparency here today and to look at the actuals versus the projected numbers. We know and understand that obviously between the budget book and the presentation today, we came with some similar questions. Again, seeking more transparency about where and how our money is spent. We know that you hear it often, but I do believe it needs to be reiterated that these budgets are moral documents about where and how a city chooses to spend its money. And so within that, what it does look like to us is that there is potentially up to $5 million more for police, and we know at the same time that there's $5 million being cut from the low barrier shelters budget. With that comparison in a state that criminalizes being unhoused, I do challenge this council to ask what it would mean to put people into the criminal legal cycle, a cycle and a system that will trap them, versus funding the potential resources and opportunities to break those cycles. So I know that this is a long process for this council. I know that there are a lot of different moving pieces. I know, however, that an increase in NOPD and a decrease in other areas that actually are proven effective should be answered and should be answered with transparency and accountability. Thank you. Thank you. That's the end of the public comment cards. Council Member Green. Because this is a moral document, that would be one of the reasons I'd be concerned with any cut in a department that has shown through its work that it is keeping our citizens safer. It's important to recognize some of the changes that are taking place in our city of New Orleans in terms of our reduction in crime, but people forget that the reduction in crime means that there are fewer victims of crime. And if you are morally inclined to do something positive for this city, your first concern should be with those who are the victims of crime. So I want to start off by saying that within the New Orleans Police Department is the Victim Witness Assistance Unit, which doesn't get a lot of attention in the social workers that are in each department, each district of our city. They've done tremendous work in helping people who are the real, who should be the real focus of the criminal justice system feel a little bit better. And those are the people who have been victimized, who have been terrorized, who are the survivors of crime. I want to thank the NOPD for the Victim Witness Assistance Unit.

I want to congratulate the NOPD on recruitment. I remember four years ago we were talking about hemorrhaging in our police department. Now we have more applications, members of the media, we have a higher percentage of those who are submitting applications, taking tests, and that is a good situation. We have been compared to Washington, D.C. in terms of the reduction in crime. Yes, Washington, D.C.'s population is twice the population of New Orleans, but do you know that in Washington, D.C. there are 3,400 officers? There are also 3,000 members of the National Guard patrolling the city of Washington, D.C. But here in New Orleans we have 900-plus hardworking officers and 300 civilians on workers who are doing tremendous work. Compare that, members of the media, to Washington, D.C. If those are the two top cities that have been recognized for positive change relative to crime reduction, just think what that says about New Orleans and our New Orleans Police Department, the tremendous work that is being done. The tremendous work that is being done by also those who have been in support, because I've been a member of the Council for four years and we've done some things. We've provided certain technology. We've always said that if there is something that is going to work, tell us about it and we support it. So a combination of the New Orleans Police Department working with elected officials has made some positive results in our city of New Orleans. I'm just also pleased to just say this in general about our budget. I am proud to be a member or a resident of the city of New Orleans where we are making these changes. I am the oldest member on the Council and that means that I've seen a lot. I've seen a lot since the 1970s when crime was just out of control in our city. I remember when I was the head of economic development under Mayor Morial, we had 400 murders in our city of New Orleans. I am not going to let us forget in terms of the moral document what we need to be doing to keep our citizens safer. This year we are going to have the lowest murder rate in the last 57 years. Awesome, if that's the number. Is that the number? Is it about 50 plus years? At the end of the day, we may have less than 100 murders and each murder is a As a human being, and I am sorry for that, but we have got to continue to make progress in the areas where progress has been shown already. So as we look at the budget, I want to say to Mayor Moreno, I know the difficult situation that you're in, Chief Harrison, the difficult situation that you're in. But I'm going to do everything that I can to oppose the reductions in OSS and to oppose the reductions in the number of civilian workers. Because if it's working, and people are feeling good, and I'm going to meetings all the time where people are saying they want more surveillance because they like what they see, I'm going to do everything that I can to make sure that we continue moving in the path that leads us to greater public safety. But I just want to say to all of the officers who are there, to everyone who is not here who is watching, I'm proud of the work of the New Orleans Police Department and I'm going to do everything that I can. Working with you, Mayor Moreno, if you're listening, working with you to identify the resources that allow us to continue to keep our cities safe and to make our citizens pleased that they are residents of New Orleans. Thank you very much for this opportunity. And I even look forward to, I'll throw this in, to working with those who have concerns relative to surveillance. I want more surveillance. The people of the district that I represent want more cameras. They don't ask for fewer cameras because the cameras are working. Arrests are being made. The fifth district rate of crime is down so much compared to 2022 that if anyone looked at those numbers, they would say that there's got to be something exceptional going on within our police department relative to the arrests that are being made and the surveillance that is being done and the investigations that are being done. So I'm just saying that when we look at certain things and we use the word moral, moral is making our citizens safer. We are moving in the right direction and I'm going to do everything that I can to continue us moving in that right direction. Thank you members of the NOPD for the work that you do. Thank you. Any last words from our NOPD? I think the young lady referenced $3 million being added to our budget. That represents the transfer of the DPW employees for 2027. I think we still need to get the actuals from 2024 on down. Yes, and we will provide you with that. And once we get those numbers to the public, we'll make sure that we get them to the public as well. Okay, thank you. Thank you. And thank you for your service. Thank you everybody behind you. Thanks. Ashley? Up next is the fire department. Fire department, you're up next. Whenever you're ready. Council members, good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to come before you this morning. I'm Roman Nelson, our superintendent of the fire department. To my left, I have our fire administrator, Tamekia Dunkley Edmonds, Edmund, apologies, to my right, deputy superintendent of operations, Armand Bordes, and to his right, deputy superintendent of planning, Robert Isileau, and I think in the rear, we have our recently retired deputy superintendent of administration, Albert Thomas. Our priority for 2027 remains protecting life and property while maintaining our PIL class one standard and providing the reliability the residents of New Orleans expect. I'll cover our general fund changes, key adjustments, efficiencies, 2026 accomplishments, and our 2027 goals. The 2027 proposed general fund budget is $127.07 million, personnel at $125.9 million, operating at $1.17 million, with a total reduction of $5.47 million versus 2026.

The reductions are primarily from attrition and pension adjustments with targeted operating terms. We shape these changes to preserve core response operations, prioritizing safety and service continuity. We are aligning with citywide fiscal stewardship while protecting frontline capacity. Key components, we reduced personnel in 2027 through attrition by not backfilling 29 FTE firefighter positions and implementing pension cost reductions. In other operating, we eliminated professional memberships, discontinued the ready rebound cooperative endeavor agreement, and postponed our 10-year turnout year replacement cycle. We will closely monitor PPE condition and prioritize replacements where operational safety requires for our members. The bottom line is by doing targeted trims, minimizing the impact on emergency response. The 2027 proposed versus 2026. This non-general fund comparison reflects a reduction of approximately $6.93 million. The primary driver of that change is the end of the FEMA SAFER grant. The SAFER grant ended in 2023, but due to an ADP error during an update, the staff were reverted back into the fund code, and so that error will be corrected going into next year. Budget efficiencies. We have maintained the removal of overtime that we used heavily in 2024 and 25 for New Orleans EMS support, and we're carrying that forward into next year, and any other non-critical usage, keeping our overtime usage focused only on maintaining essential response operations. Vacancy management-wise, we continued the elimination or underfilling of select vacancies to control recurring costs. We reduced contracts where feasible, increasing in-house solutions, or deferring discretionary work. These steps build on the significant citywide 2026 efficiency efforts implemented across departments. Our 2026 accomplishments. Despite the fiscal challenges, 2026 was still a productive year for the department. We implemented electronic patient care reporting, which helped to provide better quality assurance and quality control for our medical efforts in cooperation with New Orleans EMS. We secured $250,000 in urban search and rescue support with the support of the state fire marshal's office. We were recently awarded a port security grant of around $400,000 that will help to update all of the hazardous materials equipment on our hazmat units. We also successfully completed the annual FAA inspection for our airport rescue and firefighting operations. We transitioned into the new fire headquarters at 401 City Park Avenue. We advanced our mobile data terminal deployment, and we continued strengthening critical incident stress support for our members and the community through our K-9 Captain Billy. These accomplishments demonstrate that the department has continued moving forward while operationally and simultaneously managing significant financial constraints. Our 2027 goals. We understand the city's fiscal challenges, and our responsibility is to be a part of that solution. We will continue to work with stakeholders to maintain the city PIL Class 1 rating, protecting the insurance benefits for residents and our businesses. We will finalize the implementation of our automated vehicle location and dispatching in coordination with OPCD that will help to optimize unit selection and response times. We will continue to review positions and staffing for consolidation and greater efficiency, and we will update our station consolidation and efficiency studies internally to have the most current data for future evaluation. Council members, we feel this proposal balances fiscal responsibility with operational readiness. The New Orleans Fire Department will continue to innovate, support our firefighters, and deliver for our residents. Thank you, and we'll be happy to address any questions that you may have. Thank you. I just want to say I know that sometimes you are the first on any scene, and I just want to thank you for the work that you do. I've also seen some, pets are very near and dear to my heart, and I've seen some stories over this past year where your firefighters have helped save various animals, so I'm excited about Captain Billy and his addition. I do have some serious questions, though. What is the Ready Rebound CEA? What does that cover? Ready Rebound is a service that we implemented last year under the previous administration as a test. Basically, what they provide is, for lack of a better term, it's a concierge medical service for firefighters and first responders in general where they're utilized. The idea is that the New Orleans Fire Department, as Mr. Burnside often brings up, has very high pension costs and also very high workers' compensation costs. And so basically what they what they focus on is getting firefighters rapidly into medical evaluations, MRIs if needed and getting them surgeries as soon as possible. They coordinated with local doctors, some of the best sports orthopedists in the country so that firefighters don't have to figure out who they go to when they get injured. They can call Ready Rebound and they get them fast-tracked to get those services. From what we've seen, while the service is fantastic when members use it, it's optional and we haven't seen a high usage rate over the past year. They have tweaked some things. I think they've done some proposals to the CAO for some for some additional services they can provide across the city that I think the administration finds interesting but I think right now we just can't afford to maintain that contract given the current fiscal situation. Okay, thank you. I appreciate that. Council Member Murrow. Thank you. Just for a point of clarification, it seems like on your slide two you have attrition reduction of 29 FTE firefighter classification.

We certainly appreciate that you are doing everything possible to lower costs but do you have any concerns that recruitment won't meet those attrition rates? Recruitment-wise? We obviously have a lot of firemen who are retiring. Are we recruiting enough new firemen to meet your attrition rate is my concern. Over the past five or six years, we were hiring pretty much non-stop. So while this cut to attrition of essentially 29 firefighters will hurt, I think we'll still be able to maintain all of our apparatus and service and meet the response demands. Unfortunately, under the hiring freeze, we still have a large recruiting demand. Currently, we have about 90 applicants who have cleared the hiring process and are at the background phase but due to the current hiring freeze, they're kind of on hold until the budget allows that future staffing. The cut of these 29 firefighters, again firefighters is the the entry level basically on any apparatus. So those cuts are normally what we have or like to have two firefighters in every apparatus. So it will result in more apparatus running with three instead of running with four but it should not impact service. It will mean more work for our firefighters on the scene of fires, right? More labor intensive with less people. It may mean having to send more fire trucks to incidents to meet the staffing numbers required in the PIL standards but we've done it in the past. As you know, coming out of COVID, we were extremely short staffed to the tune of about 63 firefighters less than what we have right now. So it will be tough. It will increase the labor demands but we will get through. I know in particular, like I know that we have tried this in all departments. Have y'all budgeted for terminal leave in your budget for 2027? So the administration, the terminal leave administration, I'm sorry, the terminal leave expenditure is budgeted through CAO's office. Okay, so Brandi. I think, let me double check. I think for fire and NOPD, they're directly in their budgets. For everybody else in the city, we do have one allocation in the CAO's office. I'll check. But in their budget for 2027, there is a line item for terminal leave. We have a specific line item. Again, we work with Office of Performance and Accountability to help us come up with some numbers and metrics to put terminal leave in. Okay, I just, it's important because obviously, not to beat a dead horse, we bring this up all the time. Previously, under multiple administrations, we did not budget for terminal leave. We know that firemen, policemen, city employees all retire at any given time. It's just important to note for the public that's watching, we are actually budgeting for terminal leave now so that we're not caught flat-footed when we know, because obviously, you all know your firemen, you kind of know generally who probably will be leaving any given year. It is not difficult for us to do it. It's painful because it counts against obviously our overall available cash in the budget. But it's important for us to budget for that because we want to make sure that we account for making sure people get what paid what they're owed and we can also provide services. So I appreciate that you all budgeted for it. My last thing is, actually, this might be a law question. You all, we are in the class action regarding the price fixing for fryer trucks and ambulances, right? That's correct? Yes. Okay. Legal, we have given legal all of the information I believe they are pursuing. Okay. That was my last question. Thank you. And Council Member, just one, if I could follow up on the terminal leave issue, which is a good situation to be in. The fire department currently has 58 members on drop. I think we have over 25 that have completed drop but are still working. And that is because of the generosity of the council and the administration in the pay increases that have happened over the years that members still enjoy working and they're still sticking around and working. It adds a little bit of complexity in projecting the terminal leave, but our fire administrator and her staff have done a pretty good job at kind of projecting that. And as you said, we kind of have an idea, but we do have a lot of people that can leave any day. But they're determining, they've decided to stick around, which has also helped with our attrition. Well, certainly I would encourage you to continue to talk to your people who are eligible and say, hey, can you give me a heads up? Because it makes our job easier as the appropriating body. If we can all get in all departments, our individuals to realize, listen, if you're thinking about leaving, give us a couple of months heads up so we can make adjustments accordingly. Because it is very difficult for us, especially if you have four, five, six, ten people all go, we're leaving on Tuesday. It's like, well, you're kind of leaving the whole department in a bad spot, because when you leave on Tuesday, we're going to have to go to the city council, go to the mayor, have a ding in our budget for doing that, and then they're going to have to go find somewhere else in the budget to cut something else to make us whole again. So I would encourage you to have conversations with everyone, and this is for every department, just say, hey, listen, we respect your ability, we like you're still here, but when you decide to go, give us a little bit of a lead time so we can figure out how to manage it. Thank you, Chief. Absolutely. Council Member Willard. Thank you. Good morning, guys. Thank you for everything that you do in protecting the people in our city. Firefighters, in some ways, are the most difficult first responders we have, because you literally run into the burning building. So I just want to thank you all for that, and thank you for working with the administration on getting your budget in shape.

It looks like 35 positions are being moved onto the general fund that were previously funded with federal dollars. Is that a grant that's depleted, or are they just being moved somewhere else? Do you guys know? That was that SAFER grant that I mentioned earlier. The firefighters had actually been moved. The grant ended in 2024, and they had been relocated, but an ADP update somehow put them back in their previous code, and so this is fixing that error in the ADP system, but the grant has ended. Where were they relocated after 2024? Do you know? To the general fund. To the general fund? 2521 is our fire suppression base section, where all of our frontline firefighters are. Okay. And then it looks like you're going to have 644 FTEs in the proposed 27 budget? Yes. Are all of those positions filled at this point, or any of them unfilled? So right now, there are approximately eight vacancies. Eight vacancies? Okay. All right. Council President Moreau asked my other question, so thank you all so much. Thank you. Are you all doing the pension as well, the pension presentation? No, I believe CEO's office. I see. All right. Thank you so much for your service, and thank you for being here today. Up next is the fire pension presentation. Thank you. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you, council members. My name is Jonathan Wisby. I'm the chief innovation officer for the city. I wanted to give you some broad context for why I'm sitting here before you today to discuss the fire pension. As we were going through the budgeting process this summer, it quickly became apparent to us that we were going to have a very significant shortfall between expenditures and revenues for the coming year. Early on, identified it as being potentially 100 million, and one of the things the CAO asked me to do once we had determined that that was a likely outcome for the 27 budget was to begin discussions with the New Orleans fire pension board about the ongoing CEA and our payment schedule with them to see if there was an opportunity to reduce our contribution in the short term in a way that could still preserve the health of that fund overall. Based upon that, I appeared at the August fire pension board meeting and asked them if they could appoint certain representatives to begin discussions with us. We subsequently held four different meetings. At each meeting, I came and tried to present a proposal to them about a different way we could structure our payment plan. We discussed those proposals. I took their feedback and I went back to them with an improved proposal at the next meeting. During this process, I also collaborated with the Louisiana legislative auditors, division of actuarial assistance, so that they could, because I am not myself an actuary, so they could vet our numbers and provide some analysis on how our overall proposal fit the funding of the pension plan. So that's sort of some of the background of why we're here today. This slide here is to kind of give you some sense of the overall issue we face with funding the fire pension board and why we identified this as a potential issue to tackle early on. You can see, first off, that there is a gap between 26 budgeted and 26 anticipated for fire pension experiences, about $1.2 million. That's again reminiscent of these hidden costs that we see in the 26 budget that were not previously budgeted for accurately. And then when you look at the 27 requested, you see that $56.7 million, that's again between two different pension funds. So there's an old fund, which is a closed pension fund that services individuals who used to be firefighters decades ago, and then a new fund, which our current firefighters are enrolled in and recent retirees are enrolled in. And so that's why you see this distinction between new fund contributions. What we're proposing here is about an $8.5 million reduction in the city's contribution to the fire pension plan. And I do want to state at the onset, this is not an agreement we have at this point between us and the fire pension plan. This is an ongoing discussion. But we felt it was really important to have that discussion publicly and to share with the council and the public why we arrived at these types of proposals. On this slide, you can see some of the legacy costs we have associated with the fire pension and associated costs. You can see in addition to the new fund and old fund that I had on the previous slide, we also have fire pension obligation bonds that we're still making payments on, stemming from a, I believe, year 2000 decision to bond out certain fire pension expenses, and then a $5 million longevity settlement we're paying. So when you add all these fixed costs, you're talking about $76 million of the city's budget. Considering a general fund of $763 million, that's approximately 10% of all the expenditures. I do want to note, and you'll see this in the text below, there is a millage that is currently in effect for 2027 and 2028 that does partially offset these funds, but that $12.7 million is part of the city's $763 million general fund budget. So while it is offsetting, it doesn't diminish the fact that this is 10% of our overall budget, if unadulterated. So what we're proposing here is this $8.5 million reduction that will slightly reduce that. The consequences, if you don't touch this part of the budget, if you just leave it off and say this 10% will see no cuts, is obviously you would have to redistribute those cuts to other agencies and other services. I think the council has already seen the proposed cuts in this budget already go relatively deep, and we were looking at ways to creatively work to ensure continued services to residents. I wanted to kind of show you how the current funding policy that the board has adopted compares to what the city has proposed in its last proposal.

And I want to say what our last proposal composes of is a series of lower payments for the next couple of years, and I'll show you on the next slide the logic behind that, followed by increasing payments in out years. When we ran these numbers through the LLA, and obviously they have to make certain assumptions as well when they're doing their calculations, but their conclusion was that we would reach full funding in 2040. You'll see this little asterisk there in 2040 under the current funding policy. The way that it was initially outlined to the city, they anticipated full funding in 2039, but since then the latest actuarial evaluation produced in 2026 actually indicates that changes to the plan have extended that timeline into 2040. So even though that looks like a very significant difference there, we anticipate that we will pay off the full liability of the pension in the same time frame as the current status quo. So let's take a look at sort of why this is necessary to structure this way. And so what we have here is those costs that we talked about earlier, and when they end up being reduced or being eliminated within the city's long-term forecast, right? As you can see, we have two more years of this $5 million longevity settlement. When that cost rolls off the books, we're planning on allocating that funding to the new fund. We have four more years of these bond payments to 2030. When that cost rolls off, that would then be added to the contribution for the new fund. And then as the old fund declines in terms of contributions, which we anticipate it will do since it is a closed fund, those savings are then added to our new fund allocation. What the effect of this is, is to keep the city's contribution overall to these expense categories relatively level through 2040. So it's still at an extremely high level, and I won't deny that, but what we will do is keep it stabilized and consistent so that it isn't an over-significant burden on our immediate next couple of years. With that, I just want to close and sort of talk about next steps. So, you know, I am aware that the pension fund as of right now, and the representatives at least in the meetings, you know, have not yet accepted this proposal. Those are discussions that we are planning to continue. You know, what I will also say is an allocation of, you know, $39.9 million for the new fund will allow the city to continue making payments into the new year until approximately October. So we do have time to work out these issues. But, you know, I think what we saw was an imperative to offer an alternative to further cutting city services for residents by creating an opportunity to realize those savings and fixed costs in a way that also meets the goals of the pension plan, which is to become fully funded by 2040. So with that, I'll certainly take your questions, but that's what I wanted to present to you about the logic behind that, of course. All right. Thank you, Mr. Wisby. Council Member Murrell. Thank you. Just because I know you're giving us a status update, but I think it's important to give a little bit of context. I think we can both agree that the Firefighters Pension Fund issue is an inherited problem, not a new problem, correct? Yes. Right. And so what the administration, and I would argue the council is probably in support of trying to do, is trying to figure out a way to have shared sacrifice so that we can afford to fund the budget in a way that preserves a host of services, including those for active firemen, correct? Yes, that's correct. What is your, I mean, I know you've said the pension fund has not yet agreed to these terms. Do you feel like based upon conversations that they are open to it, or is this going to be an uphill battle? I think there's still diversity. You know, the reality is this proposal has not been presented to the pension board yet. It has only been discussed with their representatives and the discussion also has included the representatives of the fire union. What I will say is they haven't yet told me, if you do this, I will accept it. But I think that there is a lot of logic behind this in that the goals that they expressed to me that they could not give on, which were a plan that allowed you to reach full funding, that that is still their guiding star. I will say they still, I believe, have some skepticism and disputes about the underlying numbers. And so what I'd like to do going forward is bring in the LLA's auditors and perhaps work more closely with the pension fund's auditors so that they can feel more comfortable that those numbers do accomplish that purpose. And I think that would be in the spirit of transparency that we've had through these conversations. But I can't tell you that one specific action or one specific timeline will lead to an agreement. Right. And I think it's important because right now what we're looking at is we have arguably, arguably because I think we're trying to get before December 1st, we have until December 1st to complete the budget. And in order for us to be good fiduciaries, if you have not negotiated in good faith or at least are not far enough in negotiations to make this a gray area, then we have to budget for it. So I would certainly encourage you to work very closely with the pension board, with the union, to have robust, significant conversations as soon as possible because we are going to need to have movement one way or the other before the end of October, early November to make some hard decisions. Because obviously I'm assuming the way this is proposed in the existing budget is as if they accept the proposal, correct? Or are we accounting for them not accepting the proposal? I think the proposal was budgeted that way to place on record the administration's position on the best path forward. And I understand your point about December 1st and I do think that's an important deadline.

But I will note it wouldn't be a failure to make any pension payments through much of 27. And so there is some run room there if there's not immediate agreement reached. But certainly that's a decision the council has to make. I think we'll have to agree to disagree. I think that the challenge is that if we're basing the current budget off of the assumption that the firefighters' pension accepts the proposal we have and then we find near the end of budget that they are adamantly not opposed to it, then we have to reintroduce to the public that the deficit that we're trying to clear is higher. So like I said, I do think we need some clarity from the administration regarding the pension in that I would, I know this is not attractive, but I would prefer we budget for the worst case scenario versus the best case scenario. And if this pension plan is part of the budget proposal with these numbers, I would honestly prefer it be the other way around, that we're budgeting as if the firefighters' pension turns down the numbers and we have respective cuts that are attributed to it. Because what I don't want to do is have a very lengthy process, educate the public on millages and other revenue raising measures, have a general idea and consensus about what the path looks forward, the firefighters' pension for tell us to pound sand and go, by the way, we have to do $10 million in more cuts because there's no agreement. And then that could be perceived by the public as being, you know, the old Lucy and Linus pulling the football at the last minute and saying we were all misled. So I don't know what the, like I said, if the budget as proposed does not reflect the worst case scenario, I would prefer it to be revised to reflect the worst case scenario because we have to operate. under that. Understood. Okay. Thank you. Council Member Willard. Thank you. Jonathan, could you go through the last two slides? I'm trying to understand them. So what's the AON funding policy? Is that what consultants are recommending? If you don't mind, maybe I can give you a little bit of context on sort of how we got to today, because I think it is a little bit of a complex story. So in 2016, there had been disputes from basically 2010 through 2015 regarding the proper funding of the Firefighter Pension Program. In 2016, there was a CEA that was signed by the three parties, the city, the pension board, and the union that settled those differences, and that created a framework for how all those entities would implement firefighter pension funding going forward. One of the key elements of that CEA was a specific methodology to be used for determining actuarial contributions. In approximately 2022, the Office of Inspector General released a report on the firefighter pension fund, and they determined that that formula had not been used, which led to the possibility of undercounting the city's expected contribution. Shortly thereafter, a cap on contributions expired in the city's pension obligation using the methodology that was prescribed by the CEA, but was not implemented for, you know, basically through the entirety of the CEA, caused a very significant increase in the city's pension contributions. Understanding that this caused an issue in terms of the city's ability to pay, the pension board developed, and this is what the AON funding policy is called, AON is their actuary, a funding policy that started at a certain number and increased 2% annually until the fund was fully funded. This funding policy, and I know the executive director has expressed to me that he had a handshake agreement with the CAO at the time, but it was never memorialized in an approved amendment to the CEA, and so this funding policy was adopted by the board without, you know, clear public input or public city input anyway into that plan. So when you say AON funding policy, those are the numbers that were determined by the actuary as essentially a payment plan on how we could start paying down our liability. But it did not account for the city's existing obligations that were substantial in the short term for these legacy costs. The re-adjusting proposal is the latest proposal we worked with the LLA to develop. That is the proposal that we contend would get the plan to full funding by 2040. You can see the way it does that is decreasing obligations in the short term and increasing them in the long term. That is, as previously stated, intended to offset the costs in the short term of those existing obligations, and then essentially reallocate those monies in future years to the pension. So you're putting a smaller pot forward in the next few years to compensate for the old fund, the longevity, all of those things? That is correct. But at the end of the day, it gets you to the same total by 2040? Yes. That's our contention. I understand the board doesn't at this point agree with it. That's why I'm suggesting greater information sharing between our actuaries to make sure everyone's on the same board with assumptions and all that. It can get a little bit nerdy. Yes, we believe it does leave the full funding by 2040, and that's the advice we've received from our partners at Dallas. Okay, so the issue we need to work through is making sure that over the course through 2040, the city's adjusted proposal gets you to the same number as the AON? I think there's two parts to it, honestly, Councilmember. I think one part is, you know, it is really important that if the city makes this type of a long-term commitment that it's memorialized in an enforceable way. And I think previous amendments to the CEA haven't necessarily gone through all the required processes. What we would propose is that this amendment... So they're just hesitant just because of how it's been done in the past? There's been a couple of different CEAs that were enacted different ways, right? But none of them were approved by the city council. The city council approved the initial CEA.

So I think what we would be requesting as part of this is, if we reach an agreement to have the council enact that agreement, to provide some additional legal certainty to the fund that the city isn't just going to, in four years, come around and say, ha-ha, we're reducing the contribution again, that we have it enacted in a way that is legally sustainable. And then the second ask would be that, yes. Okay. And just looking from the numbers, I mean, I guess they would have a concern about the ability to pay as you move forward? Was it modeled in when you have that old fund in the longevity and that other item roll off, if it basically balances out to what we're paying with those costs included right now? Yes. That was our attempt here in this slide. Yeah. Can you walk us through that one? Yes. Sure. So you can see 27 and 28 are relatively similar. They have all four obligations on board. And those add up, in the first year, 67.7, but then it goes to 61.8, which is what's sustained throughout the rest of it. In the year 2028, the last element of our longevity payment is completed, and we no longer have that obligation. So what this does in 2029 is it transfers that $5 million to the new fund. Okay. I got it. And then in 2030, that bond is paid off, so that expense rolls off. Okay. And then the old fund, this is a schedule for the old fund that was provided by the pension fund. So we're going to develop that. Okay. But it anticipates that fund exhausting by 2036. Okay. Cool. Well, thank you for your work on this and keep us in the loop on how those conversations go. I appreciate the transparency. I do tend to agree with Councilmember Morrell. If we're not sure which path we're going to take, it's probably safer to budget for the worst-case scenario because that could be what we're actually dealing with. But thank you. Thank you, Councilmember. Thank you, Councilmember Willard. You're free to go. You're free to go, Mr. Wisby. Thank you. Ashley. You're welcome. Next up is the Office of Coordination and Emergency Management. And, Councilmembers, the office did provide a hard copy of their org chart, which is what I passed out to each and every one of you. Councilmember King, I have one for you. Thank you. Ready when you are. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, Councilmembers. Thank you for the opportunity to present the New Orleans Office of Coordination and Emergency Management's proposed 2027 budget. My name is Derek Hessen. I'm the director of NOSIM. As you all know, not only did our name change, but with the new administration, our role expanded and our mission expanded to include increased coordination between public safety and city services for planned and special events. Our mission is to safeguard New Orleans by coordinating emergency operations, delivering trusted information, reducing risk, and building resilient partnerships before, during, and after disasters. Today, we'll walk through our proposed budget, the reductions reflected in that budget, the steps we are taking to operate more efficiently, and our priorities for 2027. Our proposed 2027 general fund budget is approximately $2.74 million, compared with approximately $3.32 million in the 2026 adopted budget. That's over a 17% reduction, totaling approximately $574,000 in both personnel and operating expenses. Because of the budget, it's vital we continue protecting the core functions necessary for emergency coordination and continuity of operations. The general fund reduction does not, it does require several significant changes. Three positions were eliminated from NOSIM. First, the hazard mitigation program manager, that was rolled over and moved to the grant office. Secondly, the hazard mitigation coordinator. This position was funded out of general funds because it supports a number of different hazard mitigation program duties not tied to any one specific project. Examples would be coordinate the city's automated flood warning system, develop new hazard mitigation grant proposals, and support emergency recovery and mitigation functions. Finally, principal emergency management coordinator. This position supports emergency response activities, EOC activations, and our NOLA ready alerts and emergency preparedness efforts. Looking at the operational reductions, we are also implementing the following proposals. Reducing the RAVE emergency alert contract. Before I go much further, it's important to note that none of our recommendations impact emergency alerts. Residents can still rely on trusted information coming out of NOSIM and NOLA ready. We believe we can achieve significant cost savings by how we utilize the service. Our analysis of the system shows significant emergency and non-emergency messages with multiple agencies utilizing the platform. We believe by sending targeted emergency alerts to specific geographical areas, we can reduce the number of messages. An example would be to geofence a water main break to the impacted area as opposed to sending it out citywide. In addition, we are evaluating what non-emergency alerts can be pushed out through social media platforms or through the NOLA ready app as a push alert if we were to build out that function in the NOLA ready app. Examples of non-emergency alerts are special event alerts and also the DPW road work alerts. These account for millions of alerts each year. The rave panic button was an initiative for City Hall that would allow employees to utilize a panic button in the event of an emergency. Several factors including product integration prevented this from ever being rolled out so it was removed from our budget. The no-sum vehicle fleet replacement was removed for next year. We'll work to mitigate any gaps so to not impact our ability to respond to emergencies and requests for assistance. The EOC technology upgrades included computer and monitor replacement, and that will be postponed until 2028. And finally, the parade trackers will be removed.

This capability is important to maintain because the parade trackers feed into our common operating picture in the EOC during Mardi Gras. These trackers allow us to not only see where the beginning of the parade is on the map, but where the tail end is so we can start opening cross streets and emergency response vehicles know where they can cross routes. We will work with EMD to integrate their current vehicle tracking capabilities into our common operating picture. All of these reductions require us to be deliberate about how we prioritize existing resources and how we use partnerships and other funding sources to continue supporting the city's emergency management mission. Our non-general fund budget increases overall from approximately $73.9 million to $80.2 million. It's important to distinguish that increase from our operating capacity. The increase is concentrated in the other operating expenditures column and are associated with grant-funded programs, while personnel funded decreased by approximately $1.32 million. Although the total dollar amount increases, that does not represent an increase in NOSM's staffing capacity. Most of the money represented on this slide funds various hazard mitigation grant programs or Homeland Security grant programs with very specific spending requirements. The non-general fund budget also reflects the elimination of the Access and Functional Needs Disaster Accessibility Coordinator and the Mass Care Coordinator positions from Fund 5108. And just for everyone's benefit, Fund 5108, also known as the Environmental Improvement Fund, is used to improve public health, housing, and environmental conditions in the city and is funded through fines, fees, and other costs. Traditionally, NOSM and the Health Department both funded two positions out of this fund. The Access and Functional Needs Disaster Accessibility Coordinator is responsible for developing and implementing programs that ensure inclusive emergency preparedness, response, and recovery for individuals with access and functional needs, including those with disability, limited mobility, chronic health conditions, and other functional needs. The second position, the Mass Care Coordinator, is responsible for the planning, coordination, and implementation of mass care services to support the city during emergencies and large-scale incidents. This position focuses on providing shelter, food, emergency assistance, and related services to the city's population, particularly vulnerable groups during times of crisis. The most recent incident with the Low Barrier Shelter is a perfect example of what this position would support. In light of the general fund positions we've eliminated, I will continue to advocate for funding from 5108 to be used to fund these two positions as it has been previously. These two positions are more critical now than ever before. Moving over to the next column, this part of the budget includes significant grant-funded programs, including the Home Elevation Grant Program that many residents use to raise their homes. Those funds are simply passing through our office. The second bullet for Homeland Security Grant Program includes our Emergency Management Performance Grant, our State Homeland Security Grant, and finally our Urban Area Security Initiative Grant, also known as UASI. UASI is our largest Homeland Security grant, and this year we actually saw a 10% reduction in that grant award, even with the Bourbon Street terror attack being included in our risk score to DHS. Finally, Securing the Cities is a federally funded program that works to reduce the risk of radiological and nuclear terrorist attacks in major metropolitan areas. All of these grants listed support specific programs with specific requirements and should not be viewed as interchangeable with general fund dollars available for routine departmental operations or staffing. In addition, staff funded through these Homeland Security grant programs are not emergency response personnel, and they do not supplement any of our staffing gaps. This slide illustrates the change in our budgeted staffing levels, but it's important to note that the graph does not fully reflect our actual staffing capacity during this time period. The reduced staffing capacity has been slowly growing over the years. There is also a hard copy of our org chart that was provided so each of you can see where those vacancies lie. The general fund numbers shown represent positions that were budgeted each year, not necessarily positions that were filled or authorized to be backfilled. As a result, NOSM has been operating below its budgeted staffing level since 2024. This proposed 2027 budget formalizes a portion of that reduction, with NOSM general fund positions declining from 14 budgeted positions in 2024 to 9 in 2027. That's a 45% reduction in NOSM staff over that time period. Throughout that period, we've continued to meet our emergency management responsibilities by cross-training staff, leveraging interagency support, and prioritizing the functions most critical to emergency operations. We have already taken several steps to adapt to the city's fiscal environment. Those include piloting an interagency emergency management planner program, in which Deputy Mayor Harrison has been a tremendous advocate with implementing this program. This program brought on one police officer from NOPD and one fire officer from NOFD on a temporary assignment to help bridge our most immediate preparedness gaps. This has been a huge help to our preparedness section, as that section suffered the most from the cuts. We're also maximizing Homeland Security grant funding, using no-cost training and education opportunities, and implementing tighter spending controls and staff furloughs. We identified 1,000 COTS from the state that are available at no cost to any peers that wanted them.

NOSM immediately confirmed that our region would take those COTS, and they will be stored here at our public safety warehouse. We were also fortunate to extend grant funding for the flood warning system for 2026. Unfortunately, that private grant expires this year, but we have secured Homeland Security grant funds, so the cost will not hit the general fund. Our approach has been to look for opportunities to share resources, leverage grants, and build partnerships before seeking additional expenditures. And our goals for 2027. We're able to set these goals because we've met one of our most important goals since I came in, and that's the change of the culture for our office. When I came into the office, there were a number of issues that needed to be addressed, but the office culture was the most important. We immediately went to work on our office identity and values. Our values as an office are ones focused around accountability and having a customer service mindset. Most people can be taught job skills, so we want to be sure all of our employees can share in those values. Despite these reductions, our focus in 2027 remains on strengthening the city's preparedness and emergency management capability. We want to be an industry leader in emergency management to the rest of the nation. To that point, we must be realistic of our current capacity and ensure our core functions continue to be met. We will continue improving internal processes and cross-functional collaboration, relaunch the Volunteer Corps program, which I'm very excited for. I believe there's going to be opportunities to partner with each one of you in your council districts as we promote this program. Next year, we will conduct a city-assisted evacuation exercise that will really test our capabilities. We are looking to expand our public-private partnerships through the implementation of a business emergency operations center and implement the newly adopted hazard mitigation plan. Partnerships become particularly important in a constrained resource environment. Emergency management is inherently a whole-of-government and a whole-of-community function, and our goal is to make sure the city can effectively coordinate those resources when they're needed. To close, our 2027 budget reflects a smaller organization operating in a constrained fiscal environment, but our core responsibility remains unchanged. Our focus will be on protecting essential emergency management capabilities, strengthening coordination across city government and our external partners, and ensuring that New Orleans remains prepared to respond when an emergency occurs. Thank you for your time, and we're happy to answer any questions. Thank you. I appreciate the, and we all appreciate the presentation. It was very concise. I do want to go back to page four. Can you, again, just reiterate the Access Functional Needs Coordinator position and what they do, and then the Mass Care Coordinator? And then can you also let us know what their rates of pay, their annual salaries, are or were? Yes. Again, so the Access and Functional Needs Disaster Accessibility Coordinator, that was a position that lived over in our preparedness section. And again, their mission is to support, to target those individuals with access and functional needs. They are hyper-focused on planning, not only planning, but also coordinating those needs during any kind of disaster event as well. So when we execute a city-assisted evacuation, and we know that some of our residents that are homebound may need something other than RTA bus to pick them up, these are the individuals that we can help ensure that those missions are being kind of targeted and delivered. And again, with the Mass Care Coordinator, this is a huge role in the fact that all of our shelter operations, things like that, would run through this individual. We've got a lot of good subject matter experts on the team that have experience in that, but having the dedicated personnel to ensure that shelter operations get set up or that if a shelter runs out of water, water is being delivered, or shower or port-a-potties, things like that. that all of these different resource needs are being met and delivered to our shelter operations for our mass care. I believe the approximate salary for both of those positions was around $67,000. As the emergency management coordinator position, that would be the annual salary. Do we have a, Brandi do you know the salaries of the access and functional needs and mass care coordinator? I would need to know the classifications. Those are not true classifications. What I can state is these positions were requested earlier this year, but that fund is at a tap capacity. So the administration and council, we need to look at that in a collaborative measure. Grass abatement and some other items that move to the health department are also used by that fund outside of personnel. That fund also does not have an established recurring pattern of revenue for us to know how much revenue is coming in at any point of time. I got you. So, so this mass care coordinator position, if we have, for example, heat advisory or we have storms coming in, that person would coordinate the Nord opening and the shelter operations for people who are vulnerable. And they would also work to ensure that the staffing is there to run those centers and those shelters as well. And do you currently have any cross cross training capabilities to cross train anybody to do these tasks? Well, internally within our own staff, just based on the numbers, everybody has to wear the, everybody has to wear the different hats. Right. So that's what we continue doing. We also work with any of our partner agencies, homeless services, department of health is a great partner. And so we, we try to share in all of, in all of those duties the best we can. Okay.

But what you're advocating for is to dedicated people to do these things year round and not just in disaster season. Right. Yeah. It's during blue skies and gray skies, but all of the, all of the work, all the pre-planning should be getting done during blue skies. So it's just easy to turn all of that. Yeah. I totally understand. All right. Council Member McCarran. Thank you. Well, thank you, Director Hesson and you and your team have, we've worked together on a couple of things and I appreciate your effort. I know we talked about Jazz Fest together and recently the sirens. So appreciate your willingness to work with us and talk to constituents about things. So I just want to ask about the EOC technology upgrades, says that you had planned upgrades, but they're being eliminated for 2027. What were those upgrades? It was, it's a, it's a number of, of different technologies in the EOC. So a lot of, some of our displays, our laptops and monitors, some of those things are just need to be phased out and transitioned out. Okay. So it's not, not something that would be like vital in a... No, no, no. We, we, we still have the same capacity, so we're not, we're not taking a loss. We're not reducing our capacity or capability to be able to respond. It's just part of the, that normal IT life cycle of, of the technology. Okay. And then I see, you know, you talked about briefly the city assisted evacuation exercise. Did we conduct that in 2026 or that is, is new for 2027? That'll be new in 2027. Can you just briefly explain what that looks like? What is that? What does that mean? Yeah, absolutely. So the city assisted evacuation plan is a, is a joint city and state run mission. The city assisted evacuation plan is all of the RTA bus stops function as pickup points and they bring all of our residents to the Smoothie King Center. Once they get to the Smoothie King Center and get processed, the state of Louisiana, the Department of Transportation and GOSEP and Louisiana Department of Health, all of these different agencies will take those citizens and bring them to a state run shelter. So what we want to exercise is our, the first part of that, you know, we don't want to necessarily exercise what the state's going to do. We're focused on what the city is responsible for, that level of coordination. What do we need to do with paratransit buses, the RTA buses, the communication piece and the registration piece. The fire department is a huge partner in this mission with us. And so we want to go through all those steps at the Smoothie King Center, be sure we have all of the, all of the missing pieces together. Okay. And does that have any costs associated with it or? Any costs, we will, we will funnel those costs through some of our federal grant dollars. Yeah. So we can claim those costs through federal grants. Great. Thank you. Yes ma'am. Any other questions? Council Member Willard. Just to follow up on what Council Member McCarran was talking about. So is that like a planned evacuation practice exercise? Yes. Okay. Where are the state shelters? Where would they be set up in the event that we had to implement this plan? Well, it's, it's, so that's certainly a call from the state. There is a mega shelter in Alexandria, for example. And so we would think that that would probably be a location where folks could be transported to. But again, that's the state's half of that mission. So they determine, is it Alexandria, is it Lake Charles, is it Shreveport? Really based on the storm path and what's available. That's when they make those decisions. Okay. But they have shelters lined up in, in different parts of the state. Okay. So our, our part of the evacuation plan would just be getting people from bus stops and getting them to the Smoothie King. That's correct. Does the practice exercise go through like a logistics timeline? Yes. It's, it will cover everything. With, with a, with a hurricane, we work off of something called an eight-hour timeline. So that tells us at 76 hours out, these are the options, right, that the city has to execute. And everything regarding contraflow or city-assisted evacuation, all of these different things, you have to have so much time to execute these missions. And as we get closer and closer to landfall, your options continue to reduce, right? So this is going to help us be sure that our timeline matches the reality of what it takes on the ground. Okay. Sounds good. Thank you. Any other questions? All right. With that, you're free to go. Thank you. Up next is the Juvenile Justice Intervention Center. Next is the Juvenile Justice Intervention Center. Next is the Juvenile Justice Intervention Center. We are ready, Director Williams. Good afternoon, Councilmembers. My name is Deshell Williams. I am the Executive Director of the Juvenile Justice Intervention Center. Thank you for this opportunity to present our proposed 2027 budget. Today, I will walk you through our major changes from the 2026 adopted budget, highlight key operational decisions, and outline our goals for the coming year. I have Mr. Gabriel Williams, who is the Executive Director of the Juvenile Justice Intervention Center. He will be speaking to us today. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I have Mr. Gabriel Bordenave, our Fiscal Manager, with us, and today I would like to formally introduce you to Ms. Lori Arsenault, who is our Superintendent of Support Services, replacing Ms. Leigh Reisman. Good morning. We, the leadership team at JJC, appreciate the City Council's recognition of the important and valuable work that we do. Looking at our 2027 budget, you'll see reductions in both our personnel and operating budgets.

The personnel reduction, it reflects only the savings we expect to see in 2027 that we've already achieved this year, especially in overtime, and we'll get to that later. And I will detail our reductions in our other operating budget on our next slide. But what's most important that you'll see is we have no planned reductions in staff and the standard of care that we will be delivering to the youth housed at JJIC. We've received assurances that we can continue to hire as needed and fill vacancies as they come up. We did hope to fill some middle management positions that are badly needed. Right now, Ms. Williams is responsible for being the manager, the frontline manager to all the front line staff, which is a great toll on her, and she probably can go into that later. But we're operating now, we're successful now, so we're going to work within the budget that we have. As far as other operating, we have two major cuts. A few years back, the City Council had tasked us with expanding our programming that we do within our facility to the New Orleans East community. So we had hoped to do that beginning next year. We scaled that back, but we'll continue offering the same programming that we have been offering year after year, and we'll do the same amount and the same quality of programming next year. We also hope to reduce our costs with our medical services contract. Currently, our contract is for $1.4 million, which is about a third of our entire budget. So we're working with our vendor, Children's Hospital, to reduce some of those costs while still maintaining the high quality medical care that our youth have come to appreciate and that we are proud to offer. And the last major cut is we have two chillers that are nearing, had near their end of life, and thankfully we replaced one of them this year. So the air conditioning has been consistent since we did that a few months ago. We were hoping to do the other chiller next year, but it's been working well, so we can hold off one more year on that. I'd say the one thing that we don't have in our budget that is important that we get clarity on is we implemented a new jail management software this past year called Tyler Tech e-supervision. It was previously paid for with ARPA funds. Now that those funds are no longer available, that was one of our budget requests for this year. So someone is going to have to pay for it. It just needs to happen, otherwise we lose access to our main system of tracking youth from arrest to release. Our jail management system that was part of the E-Bus and it was covered under ARPA funding. And so now that that money is going away, we will have to assume the responsibility through our operational budget to cover our jail management system subscription. So our budget efficiencies, departments undertook significant budget efficiency efforts in 2026 as part of the city's improved fiscal management. JJIC projects a 22% reduction in overtime costs compared to 2026. We have been able to manage our overtime budget without compromising safety and security. We've hired a JDC staff with professional barbering skills, allowing an internal employee to perform a service that was previously outsourced. And it has resulted in $50,000 annually savings for haircuts for the young people inside JJIC. We put on here that we rebid our janitorial contracts, but we renegotiated the price with our supplier, reducing the cost of some of our janitorial supplies. We've also deactivated 12 of 31 cell phones. We had 12 cell phones that were not in use, and so we've deactivated those cell phones. And we've canceled Southwest subscriptions that we will no longer need due to our jail management system and also our FMX system resulting in a total of 13,000 savings annually for the city. Our increased youth programming services and our partnership with Ubuntu Village has resulted in behavioral changes inside of JJIC where we are from the start of our programming sessions in 2026, and we've resulted zero critical incidents, which is like physical assaults, youth on staff. We have four minor incidents, which is basically redirection of youth. Zero staff injuries and zero youth injuries. All right. So in 2027, JJIC has some goals set. We have revenue-generating goals, youth development goals, and efficiency goals, and a part of those goals is to implement the school lunch reimbursement program, which will offset meal costs inside JJIC. We do spend a large portion, a decent-sized portion of our budget on food costs, and so we are hoping to enter into the school lunch reimbursement program that will help offset some of that cost. We are also looking to pursue grant opportunities targeted at juvenile justice reform, detention improvement, and community reintegration, and that ties into the part of our presentation where we talked about cutting 300 from our programming funds for 2027. That was part of a community expansion that was geared towards different areas of New Orleans, most specifically New Orleans East, and so we would like to try to pursue grant opportunities so we could at some point in 2027 bring those programming to New Orleans East and then also expand our reentry program throughout the community. JJIC has a juvenile intensive in-home supervision program, and we would like to expand that program. That program is very successful. We have about a 70% to 75% success rate, and children do really well in that program. We would like to expand it, and so in order to expand it, we are seeking grant funding to try to aid our efforts.

As far as youth development and community expansion goes, I spoke on one, which was the intensive in-home supervision program, but we are in talks with Southern University at New Orleans to establish college pathways for the graduates of Travis Hill School at JJIC to be able to, if still detained at JJIC, move on to higher education, and so some of the representatives of Southern University at New Orleans has come to JJIC toward the facility. We sat down, and now we are just kind of trying to work out how we can make this effort happen, and then the last thing would be efficiency goals. We would like to transition from 12-hour shifts to 8-hour shifts to improve staff performance, reduce fatigue, and enhance overall safety while further reducing overtime. All right. So in closing, I would like to say to the council, and whoever is ever listening virtually, JJIC remains committed to safely operating the city's juvenile detention facility, providing high-quality care for youth in custody, and maintaining fiscal responsibility. Our 2027 budget reflects proactive planning, innovative efficiencies, and meaningful investment in both youth and staff, and I'm available for any questions. Thank you. What's your current staff-to-child ratio? It's one to eight, and I will say we have been able to capitalize right now with the staff that we have based on the fact that our daily population is trending in the 40s opposed to 76 and above. That's good. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a great trend, and thank you, by the way, and thank you, Councilmember King, for appearing on Monday. That seems like 10 years ago, but thank you for that. I want to talk about this $181,000 software bill that is coming due. Is that a yearly licensing fee? Yes. Okay. And do you know if this jail management system is the same that the sheriff uses? It's not the same. It's different? It's specific for juvenile detention centers. And you initially, or we as council, past council, initially allocated ARPA money to pay for this? It was covered through ARPA funding. I don't know if y'all initiated it, but I know it was covered through ARPA funding. And there was no forward planning to say, oh, this is going to be a recurring cost of $181,000 in licensing fees? Not to my knowledge. Okay. Do you have a grant writer? No. I'm hoping to work with the city. It was my understanding that they were putting together, like, a grant team, and so it's my hope that I can work with the city. Okay. Yeah, I just want to make sure that you are tapped into that grant writer since you're going after these grants, so that's great. And then the school lunch reimbursement program, is that through the state? Yes. Because we have Travis Hill School at JJIC, we qualify for the school lunch reimbursement program. We attempted to do it a few years ago. It is tedious. It's a lot of work. And so we have to find the right individual to kind of really headline that effort because it requires a lot of time. Do you get assistance from the state in applying for this reimbursement, or is it something that you all need to figure out? We have to apply for it, but we will definitely need a dietician on board because it's not – you have to have certain meal plans and stuff in place. I got you. And this is just for lunch reimbursement. It's not for breakfast and dinner. It's breakfast, lunch, and snack. And snack, but not dinner. So you'd still have to have the costs of dinner. Correct. Okay. All right. That's all the questions I have. Just to piggyback on that question about the school lunch program, would that – if you guys do get that reimbursement, would that also cover the juveniles that the state requires now to be housed at OJC instead of at JJIC? So Travis Hill is not – the funding will go to JJIC, but it's – you have to have a school in that space. And so Travis Hill also service OJC, and so they're – I'm not sure if they qualify for it. I think that is something Sheriff Woodcock would have to probably enter into discussion with the Board of Education in Baton Rouge to see if her agency qualifies. But I'm almost certain that it should, because at the end of the day, I know they're 17, but they're still children. Yep. Yep. Okay. We'll make a note to ask her about that when she comes for her budget hearing. The only other question I had about your HVAC, Chiller, would that – could that be addressed through capital planning? We've attempted to address it in the past through capital projects to no avail. Mr. Borden, if you could speak more to the issue as to why they didn't cover it. Yeah, it has been in our capital budget request for the last few years. It just has – we haven't been allocated any capital funds, so we had an immediate need. Like, our air conditioning stopped working last year, so we had to use the funds available to get it fixed. So if we are – and I understand the city won't even be going to the market for bonds next year, so there won't be any more capital funds, as I don't understand. What's the cost of the other one then? you need to replace it? Well, the one we just replaced, it costs us about $160,000. So we anticipated to be about the same. Okay. Okay, I will note that for capital. And did you guys get like some kind of maintenance contract on it to to make sure that it's being maintained now that we Okay, yes, we got a 10 year warranty on this one. Okay, great. Thank you. Any other questions? Just a quick question. It looks like you have 800,000 professional services contract for youth programming. What does that cover? So we we were at we actually don't have 800 we were allocated 600,000 in 2026. And so we were asking for an increase of 200,000 to fulfill our request to service New Orleans East. It covers structured programming inside JJIC. So it's therapeutic services that we are mandated to by license by detention standards to provide to the youth is like rehabilitative services.

So we do art therapy, we do grief therapy, we do basketball therapy, we do dance therapy. Okay, what we don't do? Yeah, we have mental health services, conflict management, conflict management. Okay. And a lot of that is done by contractors is done is done by community partners. Okay, subcontractors. Okay. All right. Thank you. Any other questions? I do have one comment card from Catherine Stoma. Good afternoon. My name is Catherine Stoma. I'm the RN clinical manager for Manning Family Children's at the medical clinic located within the Juvenile Justice Intervention Center. I oversee the day to day clinical operations for our multidisciplinary team, which includes nursing, social work, pediatrics and psychiatry. Together we care for the medical and behavioral health needs of the youth at JJIC. Our nurses are on site 24 hours a day, seven days a week, caring for youth from the time they enter JJIC throughout their stay, completing intake and discharge assessments, administering medications, responding to sick calls, collecting labs, and coordinating outside medical specialty care. Our pediatrician evaluates new youth and addresses medical concerns as needed, while psychiatry provides initial evaluations and ongoing psychiatric care. Our social workers provide individual therapy and assist with discharge planning, long-term placement, and connections to community services. As you heard directly from some of our youth on Monday, each young person at JJIC comes to us with their own experiences and needs, regardless of the circumstances that bring them to JJIC. They are still children who deserve to have their medical and mental health needs recognized and addressed. While in custody, they depend on our team to provide that care. Your continued support allows us to provide safe, consistent care during their time at JJIC and helps ensure a healthier transition back into the community. Thank you for your time and continued support of the youth we serve. Thank you. All right, that's it for you. Thank you for appearing here today. Thank you. Thank you, Ashley. And last but not least, the Orleans Parish Communications District. Ready when you are. Good afternoon, Madam Budget Chair, Council Members, Carl Fessel, the Executive Director of Orleans Parish Communication District. With me is our Finance Manager, Cassandra Robert, our Deputy Executive Director, Theresa Thompson. We've got a pretty quick presentation, since I'm the last one, hopefully we can roll through it pretty quickly for you. Go ahead. We have a historical call in incident counts for the last year. You can see our answer times are not quite as good as we would hope. The goal is 90 percent of 911 calls being answered in 15 seconds or less. We are hanging in the 70 to 80 percent range due to 10 call-taking positions being frozen as a result of this year's budget. Our budget request for next year does provide for full staffing. As a result, we're expecting to meet or exceed those national standards at that point. Calls for service information, etc., you can see from the previous years, we're hanging about the same number of calls moving forward. Next. We've got the last six months call in incident count for you as well. Pretty much shows the same thing with call answer times not getting up to the standards. As far as accomplishments in the last year, we have deployed the new NOFD fire alerting system, mock alert, and working with the fire department. All of our supervisors have been certified to dispatch in all three disciplines. Our 911 operations manager completed the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials, APCO, Certified Public Safety Executive, or CPE program. Joining myself and Ms. Thompson is Greg Edwards. OPC is the only entity in the country that has three CPE graduates in senior leadership, and we have three of the four CPE graduates in the state of Louisiana in 911. So we're very proud of that, and it shows that the interest we take in ensuring that we're doing the right things, going in the right direction. In addition, all four of our operations managers are nearing completion in the APCO Registered Public Safety Leader, or RPL, program. There are 11 RPLs in Louisiana, so again, we will have the lion's share of that when they complete that. We also have an assistant operations manager and my TAD manager who received scholarships from APCO for that program and have just started it. Our education and development team received the third renewal of APCO accreditation for our training program. Our next recruit class is scheduled to start on Tuesday, October 13th with 14 recruits, one withdrew. Continuing the progress in providing the best services possible for our citizens and visitors, I think as you've seen in the last three years of my tenure, we've continually focused on training, education, and providing appropriate services, and I think you've also seen the number of citizen complaints to your offices have dropped to around one a month across the complete council versus the multiples you were sending me to start with. National and international recognition of our work in pioneering the appropriate utilization of AI in the 9-1-1 environment. I'm sure you saw the article, the clickbait article from the northern end of the state. We fought back on that. We successfully got an actual retraction from USA Today and an apology. We suggested they take the money from that clickbait and make a donation to public service, but we haven't heard anything from that, so I don't expect to. Our goals are to ensure we hit full staffing so that we can hit those national standards for call answering, continue to improve the retention of our employees, implement a new program called ASAP to PSAP, which allows alarm companies to send calls to us electronically rather than calling us on the phone and having to have a call taker speak with them and playing phone tag if we need to request a key holder or something like that.

We also intend to push our training program down to, excuse me, to have our supervisors all achieve APCO or NENA national training or certified training, and we have postponed our accreditation applications due to fiscal issues, but we intend to move those forward again during fiscal year 27 and achieve that national certification to recognize what we're doing. We are moving 3-1-1 call handling to the Carbine APEX system so that we can take advantage of the functionality there for sending pictures, getting exact locations, etc. We're transitioning the 3-1-1 system to a new reporting and tracking system, as you heard yesterday from John Wisby in consultation with the City. That's going to provide automatic linkage to the City's order management and inventory control system so that citizens will receive automatic updates on the status of their 3-1-1 complaints rather than having to call back and having us try to contact the City agencies to determine that status. We are hardening and diversifying our standard phone system to remove long-term signal points of failure and eliminate the use of standard copper lines, which AT&T is actively moving away from in the state. We also, excuse me, intend to continue improvements in the training and qualification of our personnel throughout the agency. Our operations staffing, as of September 1st, you can see we had 14 vacancies from the ECS or call-taking position, but an important point is of the positions that are filled, 11 graduated recently from our last class and are not fully functional employees. That's what's leading to the call answer delays and issues. We do have a few other vacancies at supervisory levels that will be backfilled and result in additional ECS openings. As far as support staffing goes, you can see we have 8 of 32 positions that we have consciously chosen not to fill this year in order to conserve funding, etc. Some of those we will have to move forward with in the following year. We have requested and city administration has concurred with a total budget for fiscal year 27 for us of 26 million dollars. versus $24 million in 2026. Our request of the city has dropped by 2% in base general fund allocation and 7% when you consider the extra million dollars that was added to the budget last year for overtime. So we're actually requesting less of the city this year. The reason we can do that is we worked with the other 63 communication districts in the state. We passed an act through the legislature that allowed for an increase in broadband or cellular 911 fees from the $1.25 per line per month that it had been since 2016 to $2 per month. So a 75 cent increase per subscriber per month is going to net us roughly an additional $2 million. A million of that, we effectively reduced our request from the city directly. The other is being dedicated to everything you saw last year as things that were kicking the can down the road, effectively, and everything we worked with the city administration and the transition team in postponing and not doing, but some of them are becoming really necessary. Some of those things are the hardware and the operations for video wall, AV distribution system, that we're buying parts off of eBay, but even that source is drying up. So we're going to have to do it. We have worked with capital budgets and the capital budget system. They're in the list, but they will not be funded through 2028 at the earliest due to the bond sale, et cetera, et cetera. So we are likely to have to go ahead, much as JGIC did, and have to take action using operational funds to deal with these issues. The NICE system, again, it's still broken. It's still not working. It was out of service last year. It has resulted in our response to public records being delayed, including records requests from the DA's office, NOPD, and our other public safety partners. We prioritized those, but it's taking about three weeks for us to fulfill those now, and it's not going to get any better. Our Cisco UCM main telephony system for non-emergency is also way past end of life. And again, we're trying to limp it along in the hope that we can do a CapEx for it in 2028, but realistically speaking, it's going to be a problem. And we're, oh, okay. Yeah, we're moving the 311 system, sorry, to Carbine, as we said. That's increased our license requirement for that slightly, but it provides wonderful new functionality for the 311 personnel. As you know, in 2025, our previous insurance carrier declined to renew coverage, VFIS, because of the number of claims generated by my previous administration. We had to go to HUB, which is the same broker the city uses, and assemble a package to get the required insurance, which costs more. The good news is, with a clear claim history, that's starting to go down now. So it's still higher than it was, but it's getting better. We're continuing to work with their risk reduction people and the city's risk reduction manager. We are trying for 2028 to create a risk manager position within OPCD. We had hoped to do that this year, but not gonna work out, so that we can, again, continue to address those issues and ensure that we minimize our risk exposure. NEST Academy is planned to start on October 13th. We have 14 recruits. Should let us get reach full funding. The full staffing should make us able to not be below those national standards and requirements. And that's pretty much all I have. Okay, any questions? Council Member Willard. Thank you, Director. Had the opportunity to tour and meet with you and your team, check out your office space and your setup there. You guys are doing great work. Few questions. So it looks like going back to 2024, OPCD didn't have any overtime budgeted.

And I guess my question is, is it because you don't have enough staff that the overtime is in there, or is the nature of what you do, overtime has to be accounted for? No, much like the problem that occurred with the city budget, the same thing hit us. Overtime was being paid out of unfilled positions. Gotcha. And when the unfilled positions were backed out of the budget, we had the same issues. Okay. We fixed that. Part of our discussions with the incoming administration was a problem with having that, and they provided some additional funding for this year for overtime. It is now contained within our normal budget appropriately. And we have cut back on overtime usage as much as possible. We reduced what we consider critical staffing for call takers so that we are only filling it not when it's nice to do so, but when it's required. And by hitting full staffing, we will decrease the amount of unscheduled overtime required for only special events, et cetera, versus sick time call outs, et cetera. Okay. So you have two vacant supervisor positions, 14 emergency communications specialists. Correct. Are those vacancies budgeted for in the 27 proposed budget? Yes, they are. Okay. Looking at your operating costs, it looks like you have close to a million dollars in annual subscriptions. Correct. Can you walk us through what some of those are for? I will have my finance manager pull that up. Perfect. The next thing I wanted to ask about was just hardware and software maintenance. If you want to take that one on first. The biggest pieces of hardware and software maintenance are the subscriptions or ongoing costs for our computer-assisted dispatch system, which runs almost a million dollars a year. That includes all of the mobile display, the software for the mobile display terminals and used by police, fire, EMS, on-scene services, SPCA, et cetera. The second highest for us is our 911 telephony system. The 911 telephony system is a cloud-native system by Carbine, now Axon 911. So we don't have capex costs associated with that anymore. There are no servers, et cetera. But it is around $650,000, $700,000 a year, with the increase due to moving 311 to that system as well. So that eats up or creates almost $1.75 million in annual costs for the hardware and software maintenance. The rest of this hardware and software maintenance is things like the PBX, the mechanical systems of the building, the UPS, or uninterruptible power systems of the building. We're very fortunate with that. We actually had a meltdown of a UPS a year and a half ago and lost half our capacity. Due to the maintenance contract we maintained with the vendor, the only thing remaining of that UPS is the cabinet it's in now. Everything inside is brand new. And fortunately, all our plans worked. So you guys, the public, nobody noticed that we were working at half capacity for basically two and a half months. Wow. OK. And I guess my follow-up question to that is, are those maintenance contracts actually with the suppliers, or are they with third-party companies? They're with the companies. Everything is pretty much proprietary, requires it be with the manufacturers or the provider for that. We're very fortunate. In my previous history with OPC as the director of technology, I built a fantastic technology team who is able to handle most of the things that other places are calling for support internally. So we handle all of our first-level and basically second-level maintenance updates, et cetera, for everything internal. And our vendors and partners all recognize that. And as a result, our rates are significantly less than what other 911 centers in the state are paying for their support. So we're very proud of that fact in trying to save that money. Good evening, Ward. Some of our major subscription costs is due to our carbine subscription, our quick base subscription we have to keep the district operational for tracking of our purchase orders and our procurement process. That was one of our major issues. So quick base is what we're using now for the 311 system as well. And again, as Mr. Wisby advised yesterday, hopefully the budget will pass in order to provide the funding for that new system. Unfortunately, it won't be in effect in time to affect next year's quick base cost. So you have to carry that for another year. We've got to carry that forward. We expect to drop it. We haven't been able to get numbers out of quick base as far as how much it's going to drop it because it's not a direct correlation as you would expect based on user licenses. We also use quick base internally for our procurement system, et cetera. The municipal ordinance passed last year, this year, that requires us to move towards brass will eventually eliminate a lot of that, but that's multiple years down the road at this point as well. Okay. My last question is just about repairs and maintenance. It looks like you have three different line items there. One is for building. One is for vehicles. And then there's a third one that's 512,000. I want to know what's that one covering. Is that for... So there's one that's 172,000 that's attributable to the building. One at 6,000 for vehicles. And I just wanted to know what the 512,000 was for. Yeah, I don't think we have it sorted. It's not actually sorted on my report, but I can get that information. Okay. If that's acceptable, we'll send it. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Director. Thank you. Thank you, sir. All right. With that, you are done. Thank you. Congratulations to you guys. I was expecting you to be here until 5 o'clock. Congratulations to us, indeed. So was I. I thought your comment yesterday about bring your lunch. This is fantastic and unbelievable. Thank you. Well, thank you for your work. I know you've turned that department around a lot. Thanks for all the support your predecessors and y'all have given me to do it again.

We think we're on completely on the right track, and we want to stay on it. Well, thank you. That concludes our day for today. We're back on Monday, 9.30, and we'll see you then. Thank you.