Council Work Session Meeting

Tuesday, May 19, 2026 — the full transcript. Click any sentence to hear it.

Work Session · 2:40:17 · the city’s copy →

Thank you. OK, welcome, everyone, to the May 19, 26th City Council Work Session meeting. Our meetings are public, and you are welcome to join us in person by watching the Council agenda page through Zoom or YouTube. I hope you continue to join us in whichever manner you feel the most comfortable. This is a work session meeting, during which there is no public comment.

Please join us tonight at the 7 PM formal meeting to share your comments. We, of course, welcome your feedback anytime. You can send it by mail at PO Box 145476, Salt Lake City, Utah 8414, by email at council.commons at slc.gov, or by our 24-hour phone line, 81535 7654. Comments we receive on agenda topics are shared with council members and posted in our website at slc.gov slash council.

Our first agenda item is the fiscal year 2026, 2027 budget for the Department of Economic Development. We're going to welcome at the table Austin Kimmall, Council Policy Analyst, doing a Rifo Jensen, Director of Economic Development, and Jacob Maxwell, Deputy Director of Economic Development. Also available for questions will be Mary Beth Thompson, Chief Financial Officer, Austin, is your time.

All right. Thank you, council members. Like you said, the Department of Economic Development is here to present its proposed fiscal year 2026, 2027 budget. Economic Development leads Salt Lake City's efforts in promoting economic opportunities and provides support and resources for local businesses. The department's total proposed budget is $2,564,887.

This is a decrease of just over $331,000, or about 11.44% decrease compared to FY26. This year's budget proposes a decrease in the amount of funding for the construction mitigation grant program due to a wind down of anticipated projects. This and other key details are found starting on pages two of the staff report and policy questions begin at the bottom of page one.

We have reserved time for questions and discussion at the end of the presentation. And with that, I will now turn it over to Lorena and her team. Well, good afternoon. I want to begin by saying what an honor and privilege it is for me to work for Salt Lake City. I am equally honored to work with a team of professionals who are passionate about the economic development of our city.

As you know, the Department of Economic Development serves our businesses, local, large, or small, and companies relocating or expanding in our capital city. Many large companies have chosen our city as the place where they want to grow because of our common values. Equally, we serve residents, the families, and Salt Lakers through the creation of jobs.

As a team, we're equally proud of the work that we do because we know it impacts the life of so many. Let me give you a few examples of some of those accomplishments this year. Over 1,000 jobs, high paying jobs, have been created. Capital investment around 2.9 billion. And it doesn't stop there in terms of workforce development.

We're working with partners to prepare the next generation for the jobs of the future. 2,000 students at the Salt Lake School District have gone through uplift academy, introducing students to potential jobs in their space industry. And I have one last heartwarming story. And this is in reference to our Economic Development Loan Fund.

Many of you have probably an opportunity to visit Levity Bread and Coffee. Todd, who is the owner, has an EDLF with our city. In his first year, he projected a 200,000 earnings. And he was hoping to hire two people. In his second year of business, instead, he earned over a million dollars. Today, he employs 16 employees.

Please know that we don't do this work alone. We partner with other departments, and we thank them for their ongoing support of our businesses. We thank our mayor, and we thank you as a city council for understanding the importance of our healthy economy, which is diverse and grows a healthy sales tax base. So with that, if we could go to the next slide, I'm not going to go through this, because a lot of my comments were actually stated in my comments just now.

And the one thing I probably didn't say was basically we had three emergency loan programs, 300,000 for three businesses on Main Street. And those were due to basically the fire that took place last August. You're welcome to read those on your own time. If we can go to the next slide. And Jake has this. Thank you for having us today.

Jake Maxwell with Economic Development. I'll mention two of the most significant inefficiencies that we have found this year. One is a move from a paid project management software to an unpaid and far superior project management software, so that saves hard costs for us as well as staff time. And then the next is our Economic Development Loan Fund.

In short, we've decreased the amount of staff time spent on loans, faster process for applicants, more judicious review of loans, and we've improved our collections process. We'll go to the next slide. This slide is just a very high level. It basically states our current budget and number of 50s and basically the reduction of 145,000, which is coming from the construction mitigation grants.

Next slide. So I hope you are pleased that we don't not have any requests. We just have the decrease of $145,000 plus our personnel services. If you go to the next slide, we'll talk a bit about our proposed 5% decrease. We're proposing that comes out of construction mitigation grants. This is the first normal year that we've seen since the bond projects.

And so it's very difficult for us to say exactly how next year is going to look. We still don't know which construction projects will be calendared. So as we plan our budget, we have to approximate what that might be. So if we were to duplicate this year, we've spent about 165,000. For the remainder of the year, it's possible we could spend up to 210,000.

So with $145,000 decrease, we expect that we should have about the same amount of budget that we had this year. Next slide. Any questions on that? Come on, we're doing. Go ahead.

Yeah, thanks. Appreciate the brief. On this funding here, that was kind of my question to basically answer. But is that just coming from the grant general fund? The basic grant funding that's coming from general fund? Yes, it has come from the general fund. And right now we have a balance in there of $200,000, $1,000.

To currently we have more. We have 350 that we were given for the base budget. And then we also got 165, I think, for a budget amendment. OK, so we're good for this year. That's correct.

With your estimates right now and probably even good for the following year, if it's repeat itself. And then we just have to ask for for future years if we have a lot of construction in Ballpark or a lot of construction somewhere else that requires these mitigation funds that we had in Sugar House. So that's right. OK.

And many of the construction projects now are in neighborhoods. And so it's kind of luck of the draw where those construction projects fall and if they're in business, down to score doors. Yeah, Salt Lake, Sugar House a lot more businesses here on 21st. And so this case, Ballpark could be a lot different because it's more of a neighborhood area.

And if I say a lot of small businesses. OK, all right. I'm kind of talking to you my questions as you also just kind of explain the general fund. Thank you. Council Member Young. Yeah, so having been a part of those conversations with you guys, I kind of likened you to the Ghostbusters. Like who are you going to call when there's issues with the businesses on 2100 South and 11th East as well as during the construction.

And your team was just so vital as a part of that. I appreciate the reduction in terms of a point in time assessment and need. I do think that as we look ahead as the city related to are there opportunities and or future conversations around street spawns that would have that type of impact on other areas. I would just want to make sure that this is not considered to be like the ongoing state of affairs but that we're adjusting needs respectively.

As we know that we're looking to address streets that have local businesses on it because it really I know that a lot of people will say a couple thousand dollars doesn't make a difference but I'll tell you I've heard from multiple business owners who say it does. And so I appreciate it as a resource understanding the point in time supportive of the decision but would like to make sure that we keep that scaling discussion on the table for future needs.

I would just going to make one comment if I may. I completely agree and I appreciate your comments regarding this program. We will be changing the name to business support program just to let you know is it going to be also based on the grants.

We want to reserve the right to potentially where it's basically we're taking what we've seen today and making that recommendation but you're absolutely right there could be additional impacts and we are working with other sister departments in terms of what the construction will look like and that information is not readily available so we're providing you the best to our knowledge at this time at this point in time.

Council Member Bitro and then Council Member Carlson.

So here it says that we're going to support them through city construction. Will this only apply when the construction is initiated by the city or will this be in the instance of like development happening closing off like blocks at a time?

Council Member Bitro it's a great question.

We have also seen public utilities construction. We saw that in ballpark and we responded. This program was actually started to support what came out of the 2018 bond and that's something that we can

probably look into but I would say we need to have some parameters. I know that business districts right now next week you'll hear from us on the essay for Sure House. There's a lot of activity and business notes are asking for support so I think if we could keep the conversation going as to what that impact may be. There may be a need there.

And do you have a mechanism to accept private dollars in to amplify the what we're allocating here? I was just thinking especially in the instances of private construction that might be disruptive. I mean 92% of the people my neighbors who responded to the survey this week said that supporting small businesses is what they want to see economic development of the city doing.

The next closest response only got 58% and that was bringing livable wage jobs to the area. So this is far and away district one's high priority. We're living through the 700 North reconstruction right now so that your power is on full display in district one as well. So while I am thankful to you for helping us move through a season that's difficult.

It's really apparent that like Councilwoman Young said this can't be a permanent state of affairs or something that we count on every year. We have to be able to support these small businesses and a growing city is gonna require us to step in and increasingly creative ways like you're doing with the support program. Okay, thank you.

Councilwoman Corz. Just wanted to echo the comments of my colleagues up here and say that I would encourage thinking about how this programs could support city led construction projects beyond just road construction. And I think what we saw with public utilities in ballpark was an excellent example of it. Members of the public aren't going to ask is this a road reconstruction or is this public utilities are gonna say Salt Lake City construction is impacting my neighborhood.

And so would love to see what broadening eligibility for the program might look like and agree that this is a point in time for this year. Okay, thank you so much. Any other comments, Council members? I wanna just highlight the work that the economic development and the impact into the community. I, you know, it's one of the biggest news, you know, that started with your department and it was an accomplishment of your people was the Western Governors University and the Regal Kidding to downtown.

That is a big deal. And, you know, taking over that, you know, the portion of downtown and making home and moving from a different city really to us is a huge accomplishment. And many people don't know how big that was for us.

So thank you to you and your team for that huge accomplishment and bringing this organization, which is a good one too. They do an incredible work into downtown. So I also don't like how you abbreviate your department into the slides. It's as dead to me. And it's the opposite of dead, you know, economic development does an incredible job giving life to businesses.

And I can't, I can't, sorry, you're an initial, Yes.

I hate that.

But I, you know, I would love to see more, more small business to support like you have done. Thank you. And we have had more support to your department in the past and they created problems because, you know, it was hard to administer those many loans. But I feel like that those are loans that many of those business couldn't get in the private sector.

I would like the department to also explore, you know, filling the gap that now our federal partners are not filling anymore and supporting small businesses from minority communities, which they have removed completely now from, from getting access to loans from the small business administration. As you know, many of us heard, learned a few months ago, the small business administration decided to stop funding, small businesses that they are started by immigrants.

Which is ridiculous because, you know, it created a lot of jobs and a lot of opportunities for our communities. And I would like to see the department to try to fill a little bit of that gap as possible. Maybe prioritizing some of those, if appropriate, those businesses within our city. So I'm excited to see the work that you've done

on leading this department. So thank you. Thank you. Anybody else? Okay, this was short. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Council members, we're gonna move on to item number two, which is fiscal year 2026, 2027. As you all know, as the budget for information management services, we're gonna welcome Carol Luke, Council policy analyst, who's gonna be virtual, Secretary Posner, IMS chief information officer, no Washington, Walt King Shaw, IMS chief information officer, I apologize for destroying that last name.

Chad Corb, IMS deputy chief information officer, Joseph Anthony, financial manager. Kira is gonna give us a short introduction and then it is your time. Great, thank you. Hello, Council members. Just a brief overview. IMS provides technical and communication support to city departments. Their budget is an internal service fund, which historically has meant that usually it's their impact is only noticeable internally, but today the public can still experience their impact through the availability of constituent facing resources like the my SLC mobile app for reporting issues for the new shape SLC engagement platform.

In recent fiscal years, IMS's budget has grown mostly due to centralizing software subscriptions that multiple city departments use and some communication services that were previously distributed through different departments and those are all within IMS's budget. Similar to the general fund, IMS has their own fund balance that can be drawn from to accomplish budget recommendations.

The mayor's FY27 recommended budget for IMS is $41,549,230, which is a $1.5 million

or 3.5 decrease from the adopted budget for the previous fiscal year. The proposed FTE count is flat at 104. Much of the proposed savings for this year is realized through decreases in consultant costs and savings on software contracts. You can find policy questions on page two of the staff report and with that I will turn it over to the department.

Thank you. Thank you so much and thank you for your time and I feel like Cura's introduction is still a ton of my thunder so out of the box. We'll try to keep this as brief as we can. We know that your time is very valuable. We have with us today Noel Wachenshaw and Chad Corb who are deputy CIOs as well as Joseph Anthony who runs our finance group and can answer some of the more detailed questions as we go through this far better than I can.

So kicking off, why don't we go to the next slide and we'll start with some of the accomplishments and give you a little bit of context before we jump into some opportunities and challenges that I think we have within the technology group here.

We've laid down about 23 miles of optical fiber and what's not here is we've also put up a tower. We have plans to put up another tower. These allow for data transmission around the city which has opportunities both around redundancy as well as perhaps cost savings in the long run as we move away from using expensive ISPs.

We're looking at building new data connection systems, things like Databricks which allow us to enable analysis and artificial intelligence. This is all sort of the internal infrastructure that's necessary for maintaining technology operations. There's also a huge opportunity and I think I've talked with almost all of you individually around generative AI.

That's both an opportunity but it's also a lot of risk associated with it and there's a lot of thought we have to give into where we're gonna go with that in the long run. We've been able to deliver things through AI like a faster implementation of ADA compliance. We have used it for internal coding as we do software development and we've been really moving into collaborating with other agencies, the police department in particular on their internal processes and trying to build out what this looks like for the future.

Let me move on next slide please.

Customer-focused opportunities that we've had this year, the Shape SLC program has put out, I believe around 30 projects which has allowed our constituents and residents to weigh in throughout the city. I think you've all been made aware of this. It's something I think we should be pretty proud of. Over 8,200 people have participated around the city in that process.

I've mentioned AI-driven ADI compliance. We have a city-wide communications hub, we call ComSpace, this allows folks from agencies throughout the city to work within appropriate guardrails, branding, how we communicate with ourselves, how we communicate with our constituents, making sure that we're all on point all the time and centralizing some of that without limiting their ability to send the messages that are appropriate to those agencies.

Streamlining of software is always an issue. Asana's mentioned there, but there's lots of other areas where we're trying to consolidate in order to save costs in the long run. That's usually the right way to go, not always, and we can talk about that in a moment if you're interested. And then Microsoft Authenticator is really just a means to keep us safer and more secure while saving some costs with third party applications that we've been using over the years.

Next slide, please. So, organizationally, we have currently 103 FTEs. We've got, I think, one open vacancy. We'll probably be moving to fill that fairly quickly.

We have not eight divisions providing software services, network services, direct support of our customers, and then sort of the communications and web and media groups that report into NOL. Doing an enormous amount of work for this organization and around the city as a whole. Next slide, please. So, I'm gonna talk very briefly about the budget and where it stands, and I'm gonna hold off a little bit, obviously I have questions feel free, because I'm gonna pawn a lot of that off on Joseph, because he knows the numbers way better than I do.

Just being honest about that. We have a requested budget for $21 million, $41.5 million.

This is a reduction of about a million and a half, but that doesn't take into account. And next slide, please. That also includes an increase from contractual and inflationary dollars of $1.9 million. So, there's a total reduction that we had to take of about $3.4 million. And as we'll see, the challenge with that is really around limiting our agility as an organization.

Much of that money came from our consulting dollars and our ability to deal with sort of midstream requests throughout the organization. It's a tough one because people have sort of culturally become accommodated and used to IMS being able to say yes to midstream requests throughout the year. And that's just gonna be more difficult.

And I'll talk in a moment about some of our solutions for that. In terms of direct customer impact, we're looking at moving to a four year life cycle on laptops. We currently have a three year life cycle. I think a lot of organizations have moved four years over time. There's probably some consequences to that that we'll have to work out over time, but I'm not overly concerned about it in the short run as long as we maintain some budget capacity to deal with break fix throughout the year.

Next slide, please. So, three major areas that I think we should be focused on for the next year. Technology governance, we need to revamp our technology governance group. I don't think that's met since before COVID. No one on my team remembers exactly when the last time we met was. But we really need to be able to build some transparency, internal marketing, as well as give people a vehicle for a voice in terms of how technology is used, not just within IMS, but throughout the city.

There's a huge amount of, so we say ad hoc requests that happen throughout the year. And it seems to almost be at the whim of the CIO, whether or not those requests get fulfilled. And certainly these things shouldn't be whimsical and I don't think they have been, but I think that there is an element there of shouldn't we be bringing in a larger group and weighing the possibilities around the organization of what the most important projects and initiatives already get done.

We have to work on our customer focus and I'll speak to that more deeply and then AI is an impossible topic to avoid these days within any technology group. So I'd like to go through each of those as well as the notion of an innovation fund which we're putting forward through the next few slides and then we'll be turning it over to Joseph as I said.

So next slide please. So despite the budget cut, we worked hard to carve out $200,000 for an internal innovation fund. This is very much being worked on. I can't say that the framework is all that dialed, but this is a framework that has worked in other cities. And the idea is if we can build an organization through which not just through technology but also process improvement, staff, not just management, not just executives, but staff around the city can propose good ideas and give them a process and a voice to bring those ideas forward.

Other cities have found that as an excellent vehicle for ROI and I don't like to think of ROI just in terms of dollars. I like to think of it in terms of timesaved by employees, constituent timesaved. The ability to have business process improvements and greater customer satisfaction around the organization. And to me again, I wanna harp a little bit on the point that this is not about good ideas from management.

There are plenty of those. This is about staff who work on the front lines every day having a voice and a vehicle for bringing innovative ideas forward and finding support for those ideas. Generally a small amount of funding in those is just enough to get things started. It's one time funding and so it's a hey, if this works, your agency will probably recognize it in the following budget year as something you wanna fund at this level or a higher level, assuming they're savings and that sort of thing involved.

There's always gonna be a failure rate in these things that is expected and to a certain extent desired. Failure is a learning opportunity, particularly in innovation funds. And you have to think if one project pays for the next three, you're doing pretty great. Council Member Young. Oh, please. No, thank you. So I love this idea.

I think that it's really smart to be able to empower individuals who are kind of on the front lines related to responding to residents or needs with resourcing. There's two things that I would just share for considered feedback during implementation. So I think the first one is that sometimes the great idea may come through a solicitation or an experience at a conference or something along those lines that ultimately can be duplicative of an existing resource that maybe the city's invested in, but hasn't necessarily implemented in another department.

So I think just making sure that there's kind of that validation and or review to, is this something where we have a similar solution that we could more cost effectively implement as opposed to getting a license to a different product? I think just helps in terms of consistency. The other piece to that is also making sure that there's just a tension to what you've shared before, which is the customer service side of things.

As somebody who used to work for a state agency, I think sometimes we would prioritize our own needs first. And then we'd think about maybe some of our consumers or our constituents in a secondary fashion and just making sure that those pieces are equal related to vetting solutions and good use of dollars. I think this has a lot of great potential to be a grassroots approach to fund and kind of inform next up innovations across the system.

I just wanted to give those two cautionary tales, I guess. Yeah, I appreciate it. And I absolutely agree, particularly with the second point. And it's why I think it's critical. I think where I've seen these innovation funds falter in the past is often where they hyper focus on the dollar return. And I don't think it's all about dollars when you're dealing with constituents.

I think there's a service return that can be measured, whether it's through customer satisfaction or what have you, that is absolutely as critical as the money. Councillor Maborducan and then Councillor Carlson. I appreciate that. And coming from the manufacturing world, there's always process improvement in manufacturing and eliminating the waste in your processes and stuff like that.

And you bring up these innovation funds and suggestion boxes and streamline teams. And I know there's places where they've done well and they've also had poor outcomes because the workers suggest a lot of things but then they never get its response to them. And so go scour the other places that have succeeded and failed on them because I've seen where, yeah, the suggestion box is full of great ideas but no one ever seems about it.

And then it just fails because no one's getting any recognition for their improvement idea. And it doesn't go anywhere. So you end up spending more money than you're actually savings by the program itself. So I could go down that rabbit hole with you for the rest of the afternoon. It would be super fun for me. I'd love to have that conversation offline.

I also spent some time in the manufacturing world and you absolutely see where when people get a strong acknowledgement for the ideas they bring to the table, you just get an energy from it. Right. And when they feel like I put five ideas in the idea box or brought five ideas to my manager and they were ignored, people just stop coming up with ideas.

Yeah. Yeah. So just, yeah. I'm glad you've had that because that's, you know, eyes wide open when this, but I'm very supportive of, you know, again, back to your point of like, hey, you gotta try it. And you know, if you fail, it's okay. You learn from that also. So thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. So next slide please.

Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I apologize. No worries. I appreciate you being conscious of time. I really appreciate the idea behind the innovation fund. I know that there are many examples in the private sector where setting aside these dollars can really lead to some tangible impacts. At the same time, I'll be totally honest that in a budget year that is as difficult as this one, it's hard for me to make the case for something like this.

And I think you might be getting there, but would like to see maybe more energy focused on shape SLC and the implementation of shape SLC across departments, continued thoughtfulness around community and civic engagement and what that looks like. And so I just wanted to share that I've got some questions. Yeah, I think that's fair.

And I recognize it's a difficult budget year. I think we can have NOL dig into some of the questions around shape SLC directly. What I will say is that if we don't take this on now and recognize savings now, sort of when is the time. So I'm happy to dig into that deeper. Yeah. Go ahead. Thank you. Next slide please. So customer satisfaction is something that I focus on internally quite a bit.

It's something I am very proud of in my past where I've been able to turn this around. We recently did a citywide customer satisfaction survey. And frankly, we didn't do that great. We got about a 2, not about. We got a 2.13 out of 3. That's a low C. I don't like being a C student in this arena. I'm pretty used to being an A student.

So this is going to be a strong focus for IMS over the next year. I will say in other organizations, I tended to be able to turn this around without major staffing changes. It's really about management focus. It's about just engraining in your staff how important having a customer perspective and everything you do is.

It's not about doing your job well. It's about doing the broader job of the city well. And there's a bunch of elements that, around some of the systems we have, which will likely result in savings. We're paying, I think, too much for some of our internal management systems within IMS. And we're working hard on that right now.

We need to develop business relationship management as a core function, the folks that actually go out and act as account managers for IMS and that sort of thing. And I'll speak again about governance. I think it's an absolutely critical piece of the customer satisfaction puzzle. Next slide, please. So I spoke a moment ago about governance.

Really four key outcomes that we need from governance. And this is about bringing agency leadership together with a structure underneath them that can support them in terms of building standards, in terms of creating visibility and marketing for what IMS does and giving also a voice to our partners throughout the city, in terms of what needs to be done.

What are the most critical projects? So often, if it makes it into a budget or if someone can scramble the funds throughout the year, we say yes. And I think perhaps to your point, Council Member, not just about having the money. It's making sure that that money makes sense, that there isn't another redundant system or process in the city, and that all fits together.

So transparency, engagement, better cybersecurity, and standards are hypercritical. And this is an area where we have an updated policy under review that hopefully we will put forward in the next policy meeting. Next slide. AI. This is a tough one. Where AI is sort of the constant, it's both a threat and an opportunity.

There's so much great work that we can do with AI. I haven't put together a policy or a memo without using AI in years. I haven't put together an IMS strategy, IT strategy, without using AI in years. At the same time, the tooling around AI these days is really, really great for functionality and terrible for governance and accountability.

There's questions around grammar. There's questions around use cases and how we're going to actually be able to approve AI systems. So this is going to be a really strong focus. It starts with policy. We have an AI policy under review, similar to the governance policy right now. But it also means collaboration and really close collaboration.

I get very concerned about not having humans in the loop. I get very concerned about privacy and private information in the world of AI. And to be very frank, in terms of a lot of the public systems that people have access to, we don't have good control. And in terms of being able to purchase generative AI at an individual level, it's a massive budgetary commitment that I don't think we have access to right now.

So we've gone through pilots. We know how these things work on an individual level. We've played with agents internally. And that's worked very, very well for us. But are we ready to release it to all city employees? That's a tough call. And it's something that I hope to work through over the next six to nine months. Because when we're young?

No one's shocked by this. So I appreciate that. And I appreciate the thoughtfulness moving forward. Obviously, the security and the data governance is key. I do also just recognize, though, that if we, as an organization, are not providing the tools, we are encouraging individuals to use tools outside the system in terms of the gain deficiencies and the opportunities to be able to increase your productivity, as well as the quality of your work in some of those spaces.

I will know that, again, I understand the costs associated with that. But I do want to make sure we're also balancing the risks of not moving at a pace that allows individuals to then have access to the tools that they're using most likely anyway, but outside the guardrails of the city and the system. I think the other piece that I think is also really interesting in this space is also kind of considering and looking at it through the lens of what are the contracts that we are currently engaged in from a technology standpoint to be able to procure a certain tool or a solution, whereas we could potentially, with the right AI tools, be able to create, whether it's an agent based overlay or something like that, to be able to not necessarily

have to continue to pay for vendors that cost keep increasing, but instead move some of those pieces in-house with that additional functionality. I get it's the frontier, and I get that there are a lot of unknown questions within this space. I'm only one of your six currently council members, but I do think that it's imperative for the city to continue to advance these efforts so that we're not caught in the space of the entities that were websites.

Those aren't going to be for everyone. And then realize, oh my gosh, we're now behind the ball. For sure. And I constantly struggle with this. You look at organizations, there are plenty out there that say, we're just going to ban AI. Sitting there saying, you may believe you're banning AI. I assure you you are not. Mr. McCarson.

I just want to say I appreciate the challenge that this opportunity presents to you, and I appreciate that governance and clarity around governance seems to be a central theme. And I think that really reflects a high level of strategic thinking on behalf of the department. I'll just share the way that I'm thinking about AI is similar to how we think about our streets, our infrastructure, our physical infrastructure.

I think this is thinking about longer term infrastructure for how our work gets done. And so I don't know how much guidance I have for you other than I appreciate the challenge that's before you. Both the need to move swiftly, but with thoughtfulness and caution at the same time. Thank you. Yeah, it's a tightrope, for sure.

Next slide, please. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Joseph for a moment to go through budget, and I'll throw him under the bus on questions. I do want to say that Zack is being very modest here, that he has been with the city just a few months. And I agree that I'm the biggest nerd at this table right now. But Zack has done a phenomenal job delving into the numbers, and he does it actively with me, with all of us.

And so even though I'm presenting this, he's very aware of what's going on here and has on a line by line gone through these numbers with me. So that is correct that our budget has, we have been able to decrease our budget by $1.5 million this year. We had a $43 million budget last year for FY26, and we are asking $41.5 million for FY27.

And we'll delve into exactly how we get to that. Next slide, please. The $1.5 million net change, as Zack noted earlier, it comes with two parts. One are increases of $1.9 million, and those are primarily contractual and inflationary. And then we'll go into detail on the budget reductions of $3.4 million. Some of the highlights that we want to talk about is there are certain systems like Versa-term for 911.

We all use Microsoft and Workday. These are systems that we have contracts with that we cannot get out of the price increases. They go up every year. They have just built-in costs with them, and they do help the city perform very effectively. We have inflationary items, admin services, ex-aviem and smartnet, which increase on an inflationary basis.

We'll talk a little bit more about hardware, but this year we are proposing moving to a four-year life cycle for city laptops, and we were able to find some savings with that price of hardware is going up at a very quick rate. And there's a lot of discussion on what's causing that, but we are essentially stuck with those costs.

And so we definitely were able to find some savings in there, but those are getting offset to some degree by the increase in hardware costs. And I do want to note that from a financial standpoint, a lot of these items have an underlying cybersecurity has been and will continue to be a priority. So as we talk about some of these items, cybersecurity is built into the cost of personal services and some of the SIM costs that where IMS is taking over.

Next slide, please. So we work with our division leaders to specifically go line by line and identify efficiencies. And this is very important to note because the divisions don't all have the ability to make cuts. And some of them got a little creative in how they were going to find this without cutting services. This was challenging, but it allowed them to see ways that they can keep the service at the same level while still cutting costs.

And so we're very grateful for this exercise and the ability to help us create a sustainable budget. Next slide, please. This is a line by line detail. I shouldn't say line by line. This is a grouping of the details of the items that we're looking at. If you look at the colors, the greens were the easy ones that we were able to find relatively easily, that we were able to do without much pain.

The yellow ones we were able to do, but there is definitely some process changes and some item, some flexibility that we had to make to get them to work. For example, if you look at the computer hardware, extending the life from three to four years is definitely a change. It's a change in mindset for everyone who uses a laptop within the city.

The biggest item here is the special consultant decreases. And this is, as we were talking about AI, one of the ways that we're hoping to find efficiencies is by using AI to help with the load of these consultants. Some of these items were sunsetting anyway. We have gotten work day so far and work day is excellent in its current stand position.

So we were able to cut that relatively easily, relatively quickly. But some of them, we still do have some growth with other software such as Salesforce and Laserfish Service now that are a little bit more challenging to be able to decrease the consulting dollars and still perform. But we do have a plan on each individual system as we were looking at this line by line.

Next slide, please. This is just a chart of the prior slide. But as you can see, the special consultants take the vast majority of this. And so as we were doing this, you can see that we definitely went through everything. But the special consultants were the strongest area that we found efficiencies in. And again, note that there is no red.

So we are, I feel that we've got a good plan for next fiscal year to continue our current service levels. Next slide, please. The next item that we're going to talk about is we are very grateful. A few years ago, you gave us the right to start donating laptops and computers to the community. This program has been excellent.

We've had 161 computers donated last fiscal year. And that was less than we expected. And this year, we were able to bump that up to our 323 count. This is about where we're expecting. We are very grateful for the ability to donate these computers. We are going to ask for an annual donation of $500 computers again in 2027.

And I would like to read some examples of how these are affecting the community. For one Glendale family, having two devices meant both kids could do homework at the same time. Before they had to take turns, their mom shared. Now, they're both doing better in school and creating technology. One student stated that the Microsoft Surface Pro she received was more powerful than her desktop computer at home, that she had to share with her six siblings.

Now she has a laptop of her own that's small enough to carry in a lightweight backpack and combined with her Wi-Fi hotspot provided by the SLCC library is now able to study anywhere. She works to contribute to household expenses and has been struggling to make it to campus. Computer labs, when they're open. So these were just two small examples.

But we have lots of examples of how this is positively affecting the community. And so we're very grateful for the ability to be part of that. Next slide, please. These are a few of the organizations that have applied for and received the computers. So if you note that this is a great list, it's a diverse list. And we are doing our best to be able to serve every aspect of the community and be able to provide it to those that most need it.

Next slide, please. Great. So I really love that program. And it's headed up. Asset team does a phenomenal job preparing the machines to go out and get them into the community. It's led off primarily by Haley Leake, who just has been very passionate about it. And it's really been a huge benefit. Particularly since otherwise these things, they end up in a recycling program.

Some of them get reused and repurchased at the minimus cost. And it's just a net loss to everyone. So I'm pretty proud of that one. Councilor Regent? The donation program is stellar. If we could just have a day where we talk about the successes, I think that would be really gratifying. So thank you for continuing that.

Can I ask about? So my neighbors, their biggest concern is the cybersecurity. They're nervous about their data being held by the city and then through maybe not even any malfeasance of our own. There's a generalized distrust. I don't think for the average person, including me, we can separate AI from the personalities who act like literal villains from the comics.

We grew up like if Lex Luthor wasn't the person in charge of our AI development right now, we could all trust it a little more. And so I think we're standing in those crosshairs even as we're looking at how do we make this technology work to create an optimized city. So I'd love to hear just a little bit about, or maybe this is a longer term, conversation.

Just how are we, one of my neighbors even suggests to just collect minimal information. So how are we making sure that we're only collecting information that is absolutely necessary? And people here aren't just talking about the license plate readers, which of course was a huge one that came up for us. But they talk about business licensing.

They talk about paying parking tickets in here. They talk about any time they interface with the city. They're the My SLC app when they put their information. So maybe talk a little bit about that. And then my second question is, how did you arrive at four years? Because this baby right here is going on five. And I am not.

I'm not you guys. Tech doesn't love me. And so I need to write some emails. I need to do some word processing and maybe some looking at JSTOR to make sure that I've done a lit review. So I'm not completely not being unintelligent. How are we arriving at four years as a universal standard? I could probably get another five out of this one and be just fine.

Yeah, so I'm going to be pretty transparent on that one. We were at a three-year life cycle, when we were looking at budget and I said, we can easily go to four. And let's see what happens. And then if four works, maybe on a case-by-case basis, we should look at it on a go-forward basis. Max, I use a Mac myself. They tend to last a lot longer, particularly for folks who aren't power users.

Folks, and I used to be more of a power user when I was cooler. Now I'm a management nerd and I need a browser and a word processor, right? And so I think that over time we should be asking ourselves those questions. So then individuals, if you came to me and asked, can I replace this? As long as there's no cybersecurity concerns and I'm not compromising something, I would have the option to be like, no, this still works for me?

And in fact, the only problem I have with that is oftentimes those cybersecurity issues will pop up midstream and you'll be stuck on a piece of hardware that can't be upgraded now. And this has happened to me in the past. You say, oh, gosh, we were on a four-year life cycle. But I have 30% of my machines that must be replaced this year because they can't be upgraded to the latest and greatest.

So four years, and again, I wish I had a better answer than this. It's kind of a gut-feel thing for now. And we're going to have to see how it goes. But I do want to go back to your question about privacy because I think that's absolutely critical. We hired, I'm not even sure when we hired it was, before I came on, Whitney Phillips.

At least our one ask in last year's budget. Got it. So Whitney Phillips was a privacy officer. She worked for the Board of Education as their chief privacy officer. She worked at a very high level at the state of Utah. We brought her on when I was at Salt Lake County. She was a huge pain to me because she was the one who would turn to us and continuously say, this is what you have to do and you have to get there.

So having her on our side and guiding those conversations has been a huge boon. Now we're in our infancy. The state has mandated certain data privacy rules. She's conducted PIA's privacy impact assessments with I think there's been two or three so far, including the real-time crime center. And the result of those assessments is sort of an internal it's not a gotcha.

It's a here are the things we think you should be doing to protect privacy. As we're bringing systems on, are you per state law now, collecting only the bare minimum of information and titrating that into as few databases as are necessary so you don't have to worry about them leaking out into the public. That said, this is going to be a long journey.

We have been collecting probably more information than we need. I actually can't speak for the city. But the county had this problem. We'd been collecting because it was just the nature of government that we collected far more information than we needed for years and years and years. And kind of getting ourselves out of that process is not going to happen overnight.

Thank you. And then I think in the future I'd love to come in here. I love the concept you introduced earlier about the governance as a mechanism for voice of the community. And I'd love to see how you envision that happening. I think that's a tremendous kind of vision that I'd love to see come to pass. For sure. That's one more doogen.

Thank you very much. Thanks for coming. I appreciate the first budget. So nice work. My question is on my SLC because I really love that program. And I've been using it since the beginning. And I keep on telling my neighbors, get to get this app, put it on your phone, and I'll show you how to use it. And if I can use it, you guys can use it.

But sometimes I have some glitches in there. And I'm just wondering how it sits in your realm, but how does the other departments and how we make that better back to the improvements inside the house for the customer and also for the departments to make sure that it's streamlining on both ends, both sides out. And do you kind of walk us through some maybe ideas or how you make that program better for everybody's use?

Yeah. It's kind of been your baby or I can. Do you want to take that one?

Go ahead and keep talking. Go ahead. Yeah. So I think there's a couple of things. I think that we need, I constantly beat on the governance drum. I think it needs a little bit of better governance, so it's not sort of counsel, the mayor's office, et cetera. It makes requests and we fulfill those requests. I think that an internal sort of product ownership group would be really, really useful.

I admit that I have a little bit of a vision of the future for it. I'm not sure if it's going to resonate or not. And I'm super preliminary. But I think right now it's a one-way tool. People can submit tickets. That's a really important use. It's probably the most important use case. I used it years ago and you go out for a run and someone dumped a mattress by the side of the road and put in a thing.

And a day later, the mattress was gone. I thought that was really impressive. Pot holes, all of those kind of things. But we also could potentially use it as a broadcast system as well. Here are things going on around the city. I would love to see that built in. I'd love to see more customer feedback built into it. Not just, that's a hard one.

People don't really often give customer feedback. But to be able to say, is the app working for you? And what can we do to develop that? So thank you, consumers. I do have a few comments and certainly questions, mostly focus on the communications and centralization of that within IMS. Oh, good. I was just telling the vice chair that I also have a question when you're done.

Oh, OK. Well, make sure that you are not. Thank you. So I do value the amazing work that MS does and all of the other aspects too is incredible. And my SLC is a far greater tool than we had before. And I enjoyed more to use it than before too. And I also love that you can search things in there. And it will give you context.

It will give you ordinances. It will give you really like information. So it's in so many ways an educational tool for our neighbors, for those that want to learn more. So I appreciate how robust it is as a tool. I did see in the application, in the app, that you can send comments to the administration side. I would love to see if some of that could be embedded to our side as well, to contact the representatives for the districts.

I don't know how complicated that might be. It sounds complicated. But I wonder if there is a way to do that. Maybe as a tool for the council members to also reach out to audiences within our districts that might have concerns or thoughts or ideas, even that could share with us individual council districts. But going back to the centralization of communication, I still struggle with this coordination.

They may or may not happen as smoother or not within the departments. And we have in so many ways, one may say duplicity of resources. Some embedded within the departments to share and to create content. And some embedded with you in IMS. I also struggle with who has the authority to tell the department these are the standards.

Because you are also a department. And I do see, unfortunately, sometimes departments that don't follow some of those standards that we all agree on. Simple as marketing things like branding that we have mentioned before. Some departments that just have their own thing going. And it's interesting on why. But I do think that there may be some questions about how smooth or not this connection between the departments, communication teams, and IMS.

And if there is better ways to simplify that for the sake of cost, but also for the sake of better services to our community. Unfortunately, in the past, we have seen, and I can cite some examples without any one of the names of the departments because there were complicated situations. But where some of the communications coming up, some departments was complicated and confusing.

And it took a lot of feedback from our constituents to tell us what does this mean. And in some cases, I even look at them. And I was like, I don't even know what that means myself. It took a lot of the communications team here and administration in this side of the aisle to try to sort that out and try to get clarity on what they were saying and what it meant to many of our neighbors.

So maybe you can speak a little more about the communication centralization, how effective it is working, and in your position right now. I know that it's a hard question to answer. But maybe offline, the administration, I mean our council staff can help sort through some of that. And I think we should probably have those conversations Yeah, for sure.

because offline because they're deeper. But initially what I'll say is, I want to say, and I can't remember the exact number, but something like 17 out of 22 departments in the council questions answered fairly positively in terms of their interaction. That said, you make an excellent point around who has the ability to enforce standards.

We have the ability to develop standards. We have the ability to sort of tell people what those standards should be from a branding perspective. I'm not sure that we have an enforcement mechanism. I'm not sure that that should belong in IMS. In terms of broadcast communications to constituents, et cetera, we have tooling.

But I don't know that we have invested in sort of communicating beyond IMS what those tooling capabilities are. Safe with Salesforce has an excellent commerce cloud for email management and text messaging. But it all starts with having appropriate lists and that those lists are cold, is there the per regulations and all those sort of things.

So those tools exist, how we're using and developing them. I think it's very much a question mark and I'd love to dig into that. Did you want to? Oh, I guess I would just build on sort of the experiences that you talked about largely with third party coming off and imitating the cities and things of that so that we were experiencing a lot with consultants and struggling with those messaging.

A couple of things that really helped us there. One was the .gov set up by the state. It forces to reel in all of those straggler. And that gave us an enforcement tool to say, hey, you can't just go up and spin up another website for any project that you want that's resting on some consultants' server. That gave us a really nice tool to start reeling those things in.

I think over the two years that we've been working in this space, we've done a lot to sort of create those communities of practice, build those standards, build those expectations. We reinforce, reinforce. One of the things I think that is helping us this year too is that we've created the consultant guide. So for consultant guide, we have sort of some expectations of consultants that says use our branding, don't rebrand us, use our survey tools, don't go out and create data in other spaces.

Don't go out and create new websites. And we have worked with the various purchasing agencies across the city to get some base language into our contracts that tries to hold those consultants to that standard. So hopefully over the next period of time, as we cycle into new contracts, we're setting that expectation contractually.

And I think that that consultant website is a good place. It gives us, within that consultant site, it's the materials. We'll give them the images that we want. We'll give them the branding guidelines. We give them the colors. We give them a lot of those resources to do that. And I think ideally them using our tool set more, it should, you know, we shouldn't be paying for them to build a website, right?

Things of that sort. So hopefully that over time really starts to help us mature, right? Now we're moving into that next level. How do we mature just a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more. But I think a lot of those things we experienced in the past where we hired someone out and they created a whole new image of the city, a Gmail address, right?

Please don't use a Gmail address. Things of that sort. Hopefully we've got those pieces in place to start really not in a little bit more. Which by the way has come up in the past week. Yeah, so hopefully that that is the place where we sort of start leveling up our maturity level. You know, it's interesting to, it's difficult to say, y'all need to play by a certain set of rules.

When we haven't really had a chance to like bought up against the rules and exercise those a while and also bring those along. We have a monthly community of practice meetings. This last week we did one with about 40 communications and engagement folk from the city. We focused on the budget, how to talk about the budget.

We should have been the comms base. There's a new series where we're starting to talk about There's a collection.

here are the talking points around budget. Right now the team's working on talking points around drought and water conservation. There's a lot of topics around that that we have that. So we're trying to build those resources so that as comms and engagement folks we're using common vocabularies. And hopefully not having to correct each other too often.

Yeah. And I know that this is a tough place in so many ways because you are also a department, right? And is this independence within the departments of trying to say things how they think it's best? And it's a hard thing. I wonder how other cities and other music parties handle something like this. I wonder if we have explored that.

Maybe there is an opportunity to learn about cities and how they develop this level of communication. Because I think that, you know, to cite, you know, in some of the public lands things or some of the, you know, utility changes rates last year, right? That they were very complicated to explain.

We could have saved a lot of stress from all of our lives if we, you know, communicated those a little bit more clear. So I will appreciate to have the opportunity to talk more offline about this. Thank you. Councillor M worton. Yes, thank you. Just wanted to thank you for all the work that you've done on my SLC. It is such a huge improvement from what we had before.

And I support any investments improvements, anything like that coming forward because I think it's so much a part of what I get approached as a council member for on a daily basis.

And being able to refer people to that app has been so helpful and I think truly saves a lot of time and resources.

And then I agree with what my colleagues have said about asking for the minimum information or only what information's required. I also want to like give some contradictory thoughts too. So I agree with that, but I also want to really be mindful of where

as we continue to have more advancements in AI and there continues to be, it seems like new ways to sort of hide things. What I'm referring to specifically is when we have the permit for the protests and the No Kings protests where someone was shot and we had a hard time finding whether the person who asked for that permit was a resident or a real person.

I just want to make sure that we don't, in attempting to be, to collect the minimum amount of information that we don't end up being satisfied with information that actually doesn't get us anywhere in terms of the goal of accountability. Like who actually did ask for this permit or what company is seeking this or that.

And then it's not some kind of company or fund that is faceless, nameless, and there is no accountability. Yeah, no, it's a real issue. I don't want to pass the buck too much, but I feel like that is a, that's really a question that's beyond IMS. It's within the agencies that need and use that information to say, what is the right amount to be gathering?

I will say there's, I'm often criticized by my staff. I go down rabbit hole, so I won't go too deep, but there's an addendum on my SLC at the back of the presentation. If you have any questions, please feel free to follow up. Thank you. Finally, I would like to highlight the IMS team that you have assigned to us, to our council meetings.

And they, you know, I always refer to them in my mind as these geniuses that have duct tape, you know, in their bag and they solve all sorts of incredible challenging issues and they make our meetings move as, you know, as humanly possible with the technology that we have available. And I'm always, you know, complaining about the technology here, but it's never on them.

They're always solving the issue for us and finding ways. So I would love for you to hide out how thankful we are to their work. And I know that they get through Syria as well and they're dealing with multiple decades of technology mixed together. And we're very thankful to the work that they do to the city. They're very likely watching.

So I'll make sure I pass it on regardless. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your presentation. Thank you. Thank you.

Really appreciate your time. As members, we have a tentative break. We're waiting for Human Resources Department. I'm not sure that are here.

Yeah. Council members, will you guys be okay if we continue through Human Resources? Let's get it going then.

We're gonna welcome Carol Luke. Council policy analyst who's gonna be virtual to give us the introduction to the item. Debbie Cannon, Chief Human Resources Officer. Melissa Green, Deputy Chief Human Resources Officer. And Jennifer Jepsen, Deputy Chief Human Resources Officer. And Kira is your time to give us a short introduction.

Hey, I will keep this brief and try not to duplicate too much of HR's presentation. Just to give a little overview, the Human Resources Department is another internal facing department that provides support programs that administers benefits for the city's employees.

The HR department is 92% funded by the city's risk fund and the rest from the general fund. So the staff report focuses primarily on the general fund budget proposal. Other budget changes outside the general fund will be addressed in another report, but I understand some of that is included in HR's presentation. HR's proposed general fund FY 27 budget is $5,410,437, which is an increase of $161

from the FY 26 adopted general fund budget. So essentially flat. The proposed budget does contain a reduction of two positions which were managed by restructuring and eliminating vacant positions. And you can find policy questions on the first page of the staff report. And with that, I will turn it over to the department.

Thank you. And I think we have a PowerPoint to go on with this. Perfect. And you can hit the next slide.

First of all, thank you for inviting us today. And I was introduced earlier, but we have Melissa Green and Jennifer Jepsen here. There are two deputies and that's part of some of what I'll talk about here in just a minute, but we'll start with our accomplishments, a few of them for last year. The first one was we introduced a new parental leave policy.

I think everyone's familiar. We presented it here in the council earlier, but birthing mothers now get six weeks of recovery leave. And in addition to that, we introduced bonding leave, which was updated to an additional six weeks, which was changed to intermittent capabilities. And so somebody who gives birth would have up to 12 weeks and the last six of that being intermittent if they chose to do that.

We don't have any hard statistics, but overwhelmingly the anecdotal response was popular. We've seen most people really appreciative of it. So it was a good program. The other thing that we introduced last year was a total rewards view. We will progressively continue to try to emphasize this throughout the city with employees because our benefits are such a big part of what we pay, but we did two things this last year.

One, internally through Workday, all employees can go in and see what their total rewards package is. So it includes their PTO as well as their benefits and it gives them what that total cost would look like. We also introduced an external website so that candidates, when they apply, can go click on a link and get an estimate of what that would look like for them.

So there's two sources to get that now. And then the last large accomplishment that we had was the vacation leave accrual credit program. We introduced a policy which made it available or made prior relative experience applicable to the leave accrual that you get for anybody who was newly hired, but for everybody who was currently an employee, we need to do that through a policy or a program change.

We did that through the non-represented employee base because all of the bargain employees had contracts that were hybridized from doing that at the time. We have about 797 non-represented employees who took advantage of the program and that's helped with our retention. I don't know what our retention rate is now, but a few months ago, we'd only lost about nine people that had applied for that program.

So that was also pretty successful. Next slide, please.

Some of the other things that we did throughout last year, and this was a large initiative that we started working on at the beginning of the calendar year, is we reorganized our department into two distinct focuses, compliance and employee life cycle. And that's why we have Melissa and Jen here today. That was part of the overall strategy to start looking at how our department can better serve the employees of Salt Lake City and what can we do to organize ourselves in a way that can be efficient and really start to tackle some of the big projects that we have ahead of us.

So as vacancies came up throughout the year, we took advantage of opportunities to realign, to look and see where we have efficiencies. Workday's been in place now for several years. It's changed a few of the roles that we've had. We don't push as much paper anymore. Some of the ways that we process things are now electronic, et cetera.

And so we've been able to, every time something came up, take a look and say, how can we do a little bit better Do we need that particular role, with that?

or do we need it in the shape and form that it's in right now, or can we do something different with it? So a couple of examples, we took, we also had more retirements than I think the department's ever seen. We've got about four retirements in the last year. So people took advantage of moving on, but through that, we had one retirement that was a benefit supervisor.

When that person left, we decided we really didn't need a supervisor in that spot anymore that we could actually utilize an analyst much better than a supervisor. So we reclassified that role, we downgraded it to an analyst, and took advantage of saving some headcount of dollars there. We had an HR tech full time role that when that person actually promoted into the analyst role, which was a great move for us, we love to see some internal progression, so we were able to get a promotion out of that.

That vacancy allowed us to take that full time role and create two part time roles out of that. And we had a need to facilitate some front desk vacancies. We were having a hard time with our front desk where we have people coming in to get badges and things like that. So that helped us fill that spot better. We had an office facilitator that we just don't have a large department that's running a lot of invoices and things, so that role was no longer needed when that person left, and we created an entry level learning and development tech role.

And then the last thing that we've done is that every time we've had a vacancy, we've delayed the hiring of those as much as we possibly can to try to generate some vacancy savings. So that strategic reorganization has resulted in Melissa being here and Jen being here, and you'll see an org chart at the very end, which gives you an idea of what we look like now, but that also led into some of the things that we did this year when we had our budget discussions.

The last efficiency that we have here is this cross training, and we had two critical areas in our business, both our HRAS, which is the Workday team, that's HR Information Systems, and then our benefit teams. Both of them have, they have few numbers of employees, but they are separated and siloed pretty much in what they do in specialized areas.

We realized that when one of them was out or if we had some kind of an operational need and someone was missing, we had a gap. And so both of those teams focused on cross training throughout the year, and so each of them now has redundancies built in so that if one team members out, they've got a partner who's ready to step in.

And so that helps us prepare against any risk or disruption of service. Okay, next slide. This is our current budget for fiscal 26. You can see that we only had one increase, I won't spend a lot of time on here, and then we went through the 5% budget cut scenario. I'll go into more detail on the next slide to show what that looks like.

We had $22,000 increase. It's for a software package that I can explain and just amend it, and then at the end of the day, we went down to FTEs. The net result of all of those changes are basically flat. We increased our budget by $161 between last year and this year. Okay, next slide, and I'll give you some of the details.

So the compensation software that we're looking at, we use this to do salary grading. We get surveys out of it. We do comparisons, job descriptions, a lot of different things. That's basically replacing an FTE. We needed to do an RFP this year. We'll go out and do that. We recognize that the cost of upgrading that software, getting the next version of it, is gonna nearly double.

And so we asked for an additional $22,000, which we know already that's about what it's gonna be when we get the end product. So that's the cost there. Next slide, please.

Some of the reorganizational changes we did, which reduced our FTEs. The first one was the elimination of an HR technician.

I wanna make sure we're reading, I changed that to HR instead of HT, but.

So hopefully we've got the couple of slides corrected at the end, but. So the reorganization that we did earlier in this year actually resulted in a vacancy that we had, and we were sitting on it for a little bit in hopes that we could use that in future positions, but when we looked at what areas we could actually reduce, FTEs are really the only area that we can cut.

Our operational budget, it sounds big at 5 million, but the numbers that we work from are really, really small for our programs. So we had that position, which was available. We looked at it and decided that we could absorb it into some other things in the department. And so that was one of the positions that we gave up.

Next slide, we'll talk about our learning and development. So there's quite a few reorganizational changes we're doing here. One of the retirements we had was actually our employee university manager. She retired, and then shortly before she retired, I think about two weeks before she retired, the only other employee in that work group, which was the senior learning and development specialist, announced she was moving to Canada.

And so that entire group went away within two weeks.

We looked at that and thought that was an opportunity to completely redo the entire concept of learning and development. And so we're in the process of changing it from employee university and branding it back to learning and development, which is what it is. Along with that, what we're doing is we gave responsibilities to another individual in our work group.

That person then was able to work for a while in that area showed capability in doing some good things. That person's now going to be promoted into the management spot. We recognize that we didn't need a senior learning and development specialist. And so that was one of the roles that we decided we could eliminate in this restructure.

Along with that, we're going to reclassify the other individual, which is why you see an increase in funds, the $33,000 there. That's bumping somebody up, giving somebody an opportunity to promote and grow within the department. And then we had hired an individual who was really overqualified for their role and were able to promote them up into a higher level role.

And that's why there's an increase of 18, almost $19,000 there. So while we eliminate the specialist, we did increase a few. We have big plans for that. Jen's overseeing that part as the, she's the deputy over the lifecycle. Quite a few things that we're going to do. That's going to be a multi-year project really, to overhaul that, but it will include revamping our new hire orientation, making sure that we're up to speed and modern with that, relooking it the way we do leadership training, supervisor training, et cetera.

So it's going to be a project, but this will facilitate that, we're excited about the changes in having some new people in there. Next slide, please.

The other change that we're going to do is that, and it's really kind of moving things around, but we're going to repurpose that empty employee university manager spot, since we elevated somebody else from their role. We're going to shift that just straight across and create an employee relations manager. Melissa, who's over the compliance side of things, that side of the house has been starting to get really, really busy lately.

We average anywhere from 30 to 40 employee relations cases on a daily basis. So that's ongoing, it just stays at that level. Last year, we had about 200 total for the year, and that's just ones that hit people's employee relations files, or their personnel files. That doesn't include all the counseling and things that go into that outside of just those documented ones.

On top of that, Melissa has the leave team, and so there's a lot of interaction that the business partners have, and so there's a need not to put somebody in a position who can help facilitate some of that and better serve the employees. And so we'll be creating the employee relations manager. It's a flat move, there's no salary increase at all in doing any of that.

I'm not going away, but the last thing I'd show is that

we haven't worked hard, and I can show you that in a minute. Just to let you know what's going on, our staff person is swapping for the more updated version of the presentation, so he said it's just going to disappear for a second. Yeah, no, you're great. I'm glad they're doing it. But thank you, Scott. Thank you for doing that.

Yeah, we'll skip down to slide 10, I think. That's the org chart. Perfect. So this just gives you a view of what it looks like. I kind of had mentioned we've split into a compliance area focus and a lifecycle area focus. Outside of that, there's still some things that just don't solely fit in one of those. So we've got our CRB group.

We have a policy manager who works with all of the different groups and then it benefits manager who you've met, Lori, I'm sure. And she'll be here in a different presentation. But you can see what Melissa covers and what Jen covers. And then I just highlighted the two FTEs that we will be eliminating this year so you can see where they're coming from.

And I'll just sum up and then open it up to any questions and be happy to answer any of them. But just as we move forward, the restructure and alignment that we have here really will give us opportunities for growth, some creative, or some positive succession planning and some growth opportunities in our department. So we're going to make the most of this opportunity.

I think it will be good. It's nice to see people have opportunities within a small department. We only have 37 people, 39 people in our group. And so I'm excited when we can create internal opportunities like that. It's also really good for them to see us evolve and make changes as the business changes. So we want them to keep thinking that way and look for opportunities to grow.

And then the software funds we talked about, we just needed those. And so lastly, we'll just continue to streamline and do what we can to be efficient with on our department and make the most of opportunities. And we appreciate all of your support. Happy to answer any questions. Council members? Seems like there's no other many questions on this slide, but maybe I have a question for you.

Marmee, which departments have their own recruitment teams? I know the police department a couple years ago, we funded a position like that. Do you know what are older departments? If there are any that have their own recruitment staff? Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to let these guys speak to them. Yeah, sure, I'd be happy to.

So we have five recruiters currently that support all departments. So we do have a recruiter that's assigned to the police department from HR. They help provide some consistency in the processes and making sure we're following policy. And then, so if police is a great example, our recruiter that's assigned there, he helps oversee the programs.

And then they actually have staffing that's like part of a recruiting unit from PD that helps support the overall direction that our recruiter from HR gives them. But yeah, we have the five main recruiters and they are assigned to departments. And so certain departments might have a specific person that helps support recruiting, but we always have someone from HR that also helps support that effort.

But PD is the only one that has a sole recruiter from our department. Their focus is just on PD right now. Makes sense, makes sense. Okay, well, thank you for the presentation. I appreciate you allowing us to come a little earlier online. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Council members, I think that we're sort of at that time that we were hoping to have that break.

Will you be okay if we take that break break and coming back at 415.

415. Okay, 20 minute break. Yes. Okay. We're back online. We're starting now with item number five, which is an ordinance for the budget amendment number five, fiscal year 25, 26. We're gonna receive a briefing and we're gonna invite Austin Kimmel, Council Policy Analyst to give us a brief introduction. May be a Thomson Chief Financial Officer, Lisa Hunt, Deputy Chief Financial Officer, and Betelotte Key, former Council Member Staff, Deputy Chief Financial Officer, who changed sides.

But now Ben is your time. Ben, Austin, I'm sorry, Austin is your time. All right, thank you, Council members. This budget amendment includes 27 proposed amendments with a total of $104,313,768 in revenues, $112,259,139 in expenditures.

It also includes, or I'm sorry, it also proposes adding 13 FTEs for the police department. The administration requests a straw poll for that police item, which is item A2 in the import related police expenses in revenues, so the department can begin hiring for the May 2026 Academy class. And just a quick correction to that A2 item.

The amount shown in the staff report and on page 17 of the transmittal, it lists an incorrect amount of $2.5 million. The correct amount should be $2,583,939.

That additional $83,000 was added at the last minute before it was transmitted, and elsewhere in the transmittal, it has the correct amount listed. I'll let it finance give a brief presentation, and then we'll hand it off to the rest of the budget analysts to walk you through the various pieces of the budget amendment, and with that, I will turn it over to Ben.

Thank you, Austin. Thank you, Mr. Chair. This is the fifth, and hopefully, last budget amendment of fiscal year 2026. Next slide. Can you use that? We wanted to give a revenues update. It is projected overall to be coming in $3.7 million above budget. That's in the lower right corner of the table. A couple highlights.

There's a reduction of over $600,000 in the sales use and excise taxes row. This is associated with reductions in natural gas tax, given the mild winter that we've had. There was less use of natural gas for heating, and that has an associated reduction in the natural gas tax. There's also a $1.6 million reduction in charges for services.

This is related to police secondary employment. When the budget was developed, those negotiations had not concluded. Note that this reduction in revenue is also associated with a reduction in expenditures, so it's budget neutral. There is a $645,000 increase in miscellaneous revenue. This is attributed to payments from the fire department deploying to emergencies in other states.

So this includes the Los Angeles Palisades Fire and flooding in New Mexico. There's also a $1.7 million increase in parking meter revenue. This is associated with the increased hourly rate, and the extended hours of collection that were both approved in the last annual budget. There's also a $2.7 million increase in permits, which is related to a jump in residential building permit approvals.

Next slide. This is just a summary of what we just discussed, so we can go on. This is a high level overview of the revenues and expenses by fund, and the total expenses are over $112 million

across all funds and all items. Of that amount, $49.5 million is in the general fund. Also wanted to point out, it does include 13 new FTEs in the police department funded by an agreement with the Inland Port for Westside Police squads. Next slide. If all the items are approved as proposed, then general fund balance is estimated to be 16.4%.

It's in that lower right corner of the table as well. Next slide. This shows all of the items by their section in the budget amendment. There are 27 items in total. Most of these are in the housekeeping and grants sections. The next few slides list the individual items titles and dollar amounts. I won't go through all of these since Austin and the other analysts have that information ready for you.

I do want to point out the 13 new FTEs are in the new items section, that's item A2. And there's also a few property tax pass-throughs, two of which go to the library. You haven't seen those before, so I wanted to point those out. And then the CRA true up, which you have seen before.

Next slide. The housekeeping items has several corrections and adjustments. And of note, the largest by far on the next slide is the second tranche of the parks, trails, and open space, geo-bond that voters approved. That's the $49 million.

The last slide is listing the seven individual grants. That's it for me. I'll turn it over to Austin to run through the individual items. All right, thanks, Ben. I am going to turn it over to Kate to walk through item A1. Thank you, Austin. The first item is the reclassification of the airport director of finance pay grade.

They are currently looking for a new director of finance, and the national recruiting firm has recommended a change in the pay grade associated with this is a $20,000 ongoing increase in that line item. Thank you. Any questions? Okay, that's one of you. Just one, so because this person isn't there, we're allocating, I'm guessing, at the top of the pay scale, in case we do bring someone in at the top of the scale, I'm just trying to figure out our practice.

Yes, they're looking at expanding their options and bringing in more qualified applicants to the rule. Okay, but it is possible we could find someone not at the top of the pay range, in which case those would be savings that would somehow revert back. Yes, we don't have to use the whole of it. Okay, thank you. Keep going.

Next item. Okay, Council, so item A2 is a request from the Police Department requesting funding through an inter-local agreement with the Utah Inland Port Authority, which would support 12 sworn positions in one civilian position with all their associated supplies and equipment, which would support public safety operations in around the Inland Port area.

These 12 positions, these 12 officers would consist of two sergeants and 10 officers each, which would be organized into two squads. The civilian position would serve as an evidence technician responsible for evidence booking, storage, handling and release. Initially, these personnel would operate out of the Pioneer precinct and a potential future precinct within the Inland Port area is currently under consideration.

Funding for these positions is currently included through the 2029 tax year under the Second Amendment to the inter-local agreement with the port. And just as a reminder, the department is requesting a straw poll for this item so that the police department could begin advertisement hiring for the May 2026 Police Academy class.

And if there's any questions, the police department is here. Council members, questions? That's what we're doing.

So this group would just be basically just embedded into the whole police department and then the officers going out there would be just a mix of new and skilled experienced police officers. And on the second question is more the, when do you feel like you need to have a police station in a location? I'm kind of looking at them.

I'm looking through Michael at the police chief right behind him. Good afternoon. Thank you for having me, Brian Red, Chief of Police, Salt Lake City. So there will be a mix. There will be a bid opportunity. So it'll be put out to bid and then officers who are interested can apply and then typically seniority will play into who goes to that area.

And because I'm kind of shocked that I didn't realize that area had such high crime rate, but I guess that's after just vandalism. So there's a number of things occurring in the Northwest Quadrant. One is we have a street racing problem out there and typically what's happening on a weekend when that happens, our officers are all in the kind of the more dense areas taking calls for service and then things are building up out there, then something happens and then our officers all have to leave from taking calls.

So that's one thing that's going on out there. There is a lot of economic loss going on out there. There's some illegal camping, drug use, things like that. And then there are some large parties that just gather off of the side of the interstate on the Furniture Road. So there's just a number of things that occur in the Northwest Quadrant.

This will just put a stronger presence out there on a more consistent basis, which then will also allow for our officers to remain in the areas where high residential, commercial areas where a lot of the calls for service are occurring. So we feel like this is gonna prevent a lot of crime in that area and keep our officers where we need them to be.

Okay, thank you. That's one of our vitro. I think it's important to note, and I will know on the public record everywhere I can, that the need for this increase in service is because of the expansionary pressure put on us by the Utah and Limport Authority and the revenue that would have been generated to pay for this sort of service is preempted from us.

And so I'm really thankful to the mayor, her staff, to Chief Red who went and negotiated with this. Otherwise we would be passing this cost on to our constituents, and that is the nature of these authorities. They do not innovate any new revenue streams. Instead they retain the performance pressures for the local hosting municipalities without any revenue to support the growth that they incubate.

And I think the impact to this, to the service levels on the West Side and all the parts of the city will be huge. My question relates to when do you expect to see this group of officers being on the ground? So we're hiring those additional positions now. They'll go through the academy, hopefully sometime the end of this year or the early part of next year, we'll start seeing an increase of officers out in that area.

So Council members, if you have any other questions, this is the time, if not, they're asking for a straw poll to, you know, officialize the hiring. So will anybody like to propose a straw poll to support this budget item? Somebody's supposed to propose it first. You wanna, oh, so I straw poll that we accept this funding and yeah, just so that the PD can begin the hiring process and has the budget authorization.

All right, a straw poll to accept the funding and allow PD to move forward with hiring and preparing for the positions. All of you show your feelings. Okay, this is unanimous. Thank you, Chief. Thank you. Okay, next item. I think I've got a three. That is a workers compensation premium from the general fund. And that was included in the fiscal year 26 budget, going to the risk fund, but it did not include the expense coming out of non-departmental.

So this request would create the budget to cover the corresponding transfer from the non-departmental budget. No questions here, I don't think. Okay, next item. Okay, next item is A4, which is a creation of a new fund for library pass-throughs. So you may remember that last year the Salt Lake County and the Utah State Tax Commission combined the Salt Lake City Public Library's tax status with Salt Lake Cities.

As a result, libraries tax revenue passes through the city's general fund. This item budgets the transfer of just above $33 million.

To the library, it also creates a new fund for the pass-through of revenues and expenditures like this. Any questions? I'll just acknowledge this is a little bit of a creative solution that finance has come up with to both recognize the predicament we're in because of this conclusion. I'm grateful to the city's legislative team.

There is still a requirement that the library be listed separately on the property tax notice evaluation. So if you get questions from residents, this pass-through does not mean that that money will be rolled up into the property tax notice evaluation. It is confusing. It doesn't really make a whole lot of, you know, anyway.

But that's the status of the situation right now. And I think this is a creative way to reflect the money. You'll see the next item is a CRA thing that makes it awkwardly sometimes look like our budget is growing more than it is ours, meaning the city's general fund budget. When it's really just pass-through dollars. Okay, next item.

The next item is the CRA pass-through, true up. This is the annual true up that Ben mentioned earlier for the CRA. The CRA does a conservative budget estimate on the tax increment that they will collect. And this results in a true up-up budget amendment annually of this year, it's about $4.5 million. And it will go through that same expense revenue system that the library will be going through as well.

Next item. Next item associated with these, the CRA also received the tax increment for areas that the library does not participate in, but they received the tax increment that should have gone to the library. So this is just transferring those funds to the city and then to the library. Next item. Nee-seven, this is an increase in the workers' compensation premiums and it's an ongoing cost to the risk fund.

This request covers previous under budgeting resulting from the FY 25 transition from self-insured to new workers' compensation coverage. Those calculations include the premium payment for FY 25, a premium true up in FY 26, and funding for legacy claims that were still unresolved in the city transition to the new coverage.

Next item. OK, the police department is requesting a budget transfer to the fleet fund to replace 12 aging patrol vehicles and for the purchase of a dedicated transport van for the public order unit. The patrol vehicles cost approximately $62,650 each and the transport van will cost $250,000. Just one note, the transmittal shows that this funding would replace 10 vehicles and the staff report shows 12.

The correct amount is 12 vehicles. Council members, questions? Yes, Council Member Carlson. Help me understand why the transport vehicle is in like a budget amendment versus part of the new fiscal year proposal, the timing of the request. I'll do my best and then if I don't satisfy you with my answer, we'll ask PD to come up.

So what this is saying is the police department has excess funds in this current fiscal year that they want to use for fleet. So they're going to be under budget this year. What they're trying to do is get some of those older vehicles off of the rolls and so they are willing to use their in their budget. They're willing to transfer their budget to fleet to buy the vehicles and the van.

I know that in the past they have rented the vans and that becomes very expensive as well. So because they have the opportunity in this year's budget because they have savings in this year's budget, they're requesting us in a budget amendment. Did that satisfy it? Satisfied, thank you. Next item. We are moving on to the D's.

So D1 is the 400 South Bridge Refunding Rescope, which is one time zero dollars. The administration would like to rescope the 1 million from FY26 and about 93,000 from FY23 for bridge funding and broaden the uses of the existing bridge preservation programs, Fund Pool, from bridge repairs and routine maintenance to major bridge repairs and full rebuilds.

This would affect the upcoming 400 South Bridge replacement over the Jordan River where the additional funds would cover the costs of widening the footprint of the new bridge to accommodate one lane of traffic in each direction and allow pedestrian access to be maintained during the reconstruction. Questions? Next item.

C2 has to do with budgeting, all funding available for the old library, Plaza 349, and the Justice Court Capital Improvements. When the revenue associated with these projects was recognized in the CIP fund, the corresponding amount, also was recognized as an expense. Although the funds were not initially allocated to a specific project, they were reflected as an expense of the fund.

As a result, once the funds were later allocated to individual projects, this created the appearance of double counting the expense. This amendment, or rec fixes that double counting of the expense. Housekeeping seems like issuing issues with accounting, so thank you. Next item. OK, next item is another housekeeping item.

It does two things. The first is it transfers just over $450,000 from the Waste and Recycling Division Fund to the Environment and Energy Fund, because in FY 25, the IMS charges to the Sustainability Department were incorrectly coded to the Environment and Energy Fund only. So this allocates the Waste and Recycling Division's share of those costs.

The second thing it does is it allocates to Waste and Recycling, sorry, got caught up. Just over $900,000 would be transferred from the City's General Fund to the Refuse Fund for the Utah Renewable Communities Program. This would backstop the software and administrative startup costs, and those startup costs are expected to be recovered from rate payer revenues once the program launches.

The Council members? This doesn't seem to me like a cleanup, more like a new thing. This looks second part. I think that the N Council member Dugan can speak to it. I think the plan is for the city to essentially front this money, but expect payments from rate payers when they come in. So I guess you can wrap your mind around the fact that it's cleanup because it's planning for money to come in as well as for money to come out.

Yeah, because I don't think the actual money goes out because we will be paying it back as soon as we get the bills start coming in. So it's backstop for that funding. I concur just based on the conversation around the Utah Renewable Communities discussion that there was going to need to be almost this placeholder, like to be able to say, like if for some reason, everyone opted out, you know, like that there would still be a commitment of the city to be partners in the potential costs of like standing this up in the first place, but that we don't expect that as part of the long term budgeting needs.

I see. Next item. Thank you.

Next item is going to be covered next week. It's a closed session item. So we are going to jump to D5. D5 relates to the U.DOT Railroad Safety Grant. Railroad Crossing improvements on 700 South, and that was approved by the Council in 2023. But at the time of the grant, the revenue was recognized but the expenditure budget hadn't been created.

So this amendment moves the $101,000 to CIP, and it also relates to item 3E3 of this same budget amendment which receives the CIP and creates the expenditure budget. Council members, any questions? Which crossing? We're talking about 700 South. 700 South. Let me see. There are confused a lot of crossing that is. There's a 600, there's an underpass, and 800 is a crossing, but 700 is not a crossing.

Some of you are confused with what crossing that is. We can follow up with the administration and get more information about exactly what the project entails. Yeah. The specific details. The 700 South ends, like, ends. Yeah. You know, whereas the brewery, Keto says there. So there's not a crossing. But yes, we'll love a little more information about that one.

Thank you. We'll do. Thank you. Next item. OK. Item D6. The administration is proposing a one-time transfer of $200,000 from the mayor's office to the CIP fund to support crime prevention through environmental design initiatives. The administration has stated that the intent of the amendment is to consolidate funding and allow the resources to remain available beyond the current fiscal year.

What was these money allocated before? It was just mayors general that was associated to any specific thing in the mayor's office. Andrew Johnson, who's online, will respond to that. He's in person. He has appeared. I can go back to my office if you'd like me to. The Andrew Johnson, CELICITY mayor's office, advisory and homelessness.

The $200,000 was carved out of the mayor's budget as part of our public safety plan to help address immediate needs on North Temple in particular. When looking at the safety plan across the city, we identified a limited number of locations that needed privacy infrastructure addresses to help police and other first responders.

So the money was set aside. We've used a portion of it to look at lighting, particularly on that corridor and associated streets. We've also looked at, I think that's including cotton with park at that point, but we're looking at a variety of other things going into next fiscal year. So we want to make sure that carried over.

So we're not pulling out a next year's budget. Council Member Pietro. This location is within, and one of those authorities, again, where we are preempted out of our taxation, has there been any attempt to go negotiate with the authority in the state to reimburse us or help us with the expenses that our neighbors will shoulder for them?

So the power district you're talking about, I don't believe it's in a place that has much to negotiate with at this point that I'm aware of. I'll take an IOU. We are actively talking to Larry H. Miller, for instance, as a property owner there, meeting with them about this and the upcoming Temple Open House and some associated costs there.

As well as discussions are ongoing. Thank you. I appreciate the administration finding the funding to help in this area. That is a big deal to the community.

Thank you. Next item.

This relates to impact fee. By the way, sorry, sorry. There were some good staff questions in the document and I wonder if we can get some additional answers to the staff questions already. So I will appreciate that since there's an item that the issue that is transducer always been, you know, we've been talking about it for a while.

So those questions will be amazing for us. So thank you.

Sorry for interrupting. That's okay. Number D7 is relates to impact fees, excess capacity and interest, income transfer. And there were a number of items that were mistakenly paid to the general fund in error and impact fees can't be transferred

to the general fund. This is an exception. Excess capacity was approved within the impact fee facilities fee plan. Excess capacity is capacity previously built into the system that is in excess of the level of service that can accommodate growth. Impact fee will buy into this excess capacity and effectively reimburse the general fund for this prior investment.

So a good example of this having been used in the past is when we built the public safety building over across from the library, it was built with a plan that had accommodate more and more officers as the city grew. Now we're already kind of busting it this seems when we thought we were building for 50 years, but impact fees helped pay for a lot of the portion of that part of the building for that reason.

Next item. I think that leads us to D8. D8 has to do with the CIP transfer to general fund corrections. In fiscal year 2026, the non-departmental key changes included transfers as revenue sources, but they were not included in the CIP key changes section. These include three different items. First is items associated with the earthquake, the general fund transferred funds to the CIP to pay for insured items.

When we were reimbursed, those funds went to the CIP, they may be transferred to the general fund. Second, there were unused funds that are proposed to be returned to the general fund in the amount of $800,000. And the third item is about $1.4 million of interest on CIP funds that is proposed to be transferred to the general fund.

Next item. Item D9 is the general obligation series 2026 bonds. It's one time charge of debt service for just over $1 million, another one time of CIP money for of $49.3 million. This is making the revenue from the second tranche of the GEO bond available for Department of Public Lands and other uses.

Next item.

Item D10 would provide just over $894,000

in CIP funding from a U.DOT grant to expand green bike stations in the city. Salt Lake City would receive funding from Federal Aid Highway Funds managed and distributed by U.DOT. And this item is related to item E1 in the grant section of this budget amendment. Next item. All right, this one is fairly straightforward.

It consolidates all the budgets and expenses related to the National League of Cities in the Mayor's Executive Staff Cost Center. Currently, it is split between the non-departmental and the Mayor's Office budgets in consolidating them into a single cost center will improve accuracy and transparency.

We'll have a report about how much, even if an email, how much the city was able to fundraise out of all our work because we did hire a person to fundraise for us. And the hope was to make that money smaller with money that we brought in. I would love to see how good do we do. Sure, we'll follow up with that.

Item D12 is a housekeeping item related to a stormwater project in the Granary District. So in FY22, the city received $2 million in an ARPA grant from the state to fund floodplain mitigation work. That budget was established in the CIP fund. However, the project was completed and paid through the stormwater fund. So this item moves the money from the state grant fund to replenish that stormwater fund for these expenses.

It also removes the unused revenue and expenditure budget in the CIP fund for this project. Next item, section E.

Typically, we skip over the grant section since they've received public hearings for those items already. So we can jump over to the consent section which Kate will go over. So item G1 in the grants award section is an outdoor recreation initiative grant for the City Creek Daylighting Project. Funding will finalize construction documents and prepare the project for phased implementation, building on prior design work and a $150,000 investment from the CRA.

This grant is one time in $600,000 and the city has been working with the CRA and the seven canyons trust on this project. I wanna highlight that the city doesn't have the funding to actually make this happen or at least in the last iteration of this update to us. Couldn't identify the budget to make this happen. I had concerns about another study that sets the bar very high for the community and then yet we pay for another study that is not gonna happen.

But since this is a moving of clarifying some of the funds

and we already decided on the past, I still wanna raise my concern about another project that may not happen. So thank you. And then Mr. Chair, if I could just jump in there is a council added item that we inadvertently left off of the staff report. It is the item to sort of tie the bow around the action you guys took in terms of adopting CDBG.

If you recall, there was a legislative intent to fund 250,000. I'm sorry, 255,000. Trying to find 255. Thank you. For first step house from funding our future fund balance. And so we would add that as a council added item if the council's supportive, the adoption of the motion was unanimous so that feels pretty safe. So, awesome.

Thank you.

Any more questions for the staff and for the finance department? Seems like thank you for all the presentation. Thank you for the, to the all the analysts that work on the visual items, the shuffling of chairs that was worked out very well. So, thank you for all the work. And I will still miss you in this side of the aisle.

Now, moving on to the next item in the agenda.

This is the board appointments. We're gonna welcome Turner Benton,

who might join us in person. And I don't think I see Turner. I am online. Oh, you're online. Turner, you have a few minutes to tell us why do you want to be part of the housing authority of Salt Lake City? Well, thank you very much for your consideration and for your time today. I recently completed a six year term as the chair of the Glendale neighborhood council and have been looking for new ways to get involved.

So when the folks from the housing authority reached out to me, I jumped at the opportunity. I think one of the cruelest things about our society at times is that folks can spend their entire lives working and contributing to our community. And then when they get to older age or if they have a sudden change in income, can be priced out or left out of our city and not have a place to be an eye view public housing authorities like the Salt Lake City Housing Authority as the front line in helping make sure that our city stays an inclusive and affordable place.

So I'm very honored to have been asked to serve and look forward to contributing to the housing authorities.

Council members?

Okay, I would like to highlight the work that Turner did and the Glendale community council and how positive and practical and always driven by specific objectives and goals, you know, his leadership style, really advocated for the community. And we've still seen specific projects being built and funded today because of your leadership.

So thank you for your involvement. And I'm looking forward to you joining the housing authority of Salt Lake City. Thank you. Thank you very much. The process goes as follow. You're gonna be placing the consent agenda tonight at 7 p.m. You don't have to be online or present. The administration will reach out to you later on when the meeting ends at some point and let you know about next steps.

Thank you. Thank you, Turner. Council, the next appointment, item A7, item seven will never be heard and it has been removed from the agenda. We're moving on to item eight, which is another board appointment for the historic landmark commission, Rosemary Stum. Are you online? Rosemary, are you online? Yeah, let's pull this from the agenda for today.

We also have item number nine, which is a standalone item that we have, we're required to have in our agenda. Is it, is it tentative item regarding the property tax impact schedule?

And do you have any reports of Vice Chair?

I don't have any reports. And executive director, do you have any reports? Now we're gonna, I'm gonna ask for a motion for a close meeting. And the purpose is for discussing pending and reasonable imminent litigation on attorney client matters. Mr. Chiang, move that we go into close meeting for the purpose of discussing reasonably imminent litigation and to receive advice of counsel.

And yeah, attorney client matters. Thanks. Second, I have a motion by council member Orton, and second by council member Dugan. I'm gonna call the question, Council Member Pietro. Yes. Council Member Dugan. Yes. Council Member Rosin. Yes. Council Member Young. Aye. Council Member Wardin. Aye. And I'm in, yes. This motion carries unanimously.

Now we're in close session. And we're gonna come back into the formal meeting at seven PM. Thank you.

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