Governing Body Special Meeting Fri, May 15, 2026 · Governing Body https://santafeminutes.space/meeting/1470 == Executive Summary == The Governing Body Special Meeting focused extensively on the proposed FY27 operating budget, with detailed presentations and discussions across various city departments. Key areas of focus included the Human Resources Department's budget, emphasizing employee health, training, and a new HRIS Manager position; the Municipal Court's budget, highlighting staff salaries and public safety programs; and the City Attorney's Office, which discussed increased workload due to public records requests and recent litigation successes. The meeting also delved into the City Manager's and Mayor's office budgets, including discussions on staffing, contingency funds, and public engagement initiatives. Significant attention was given to the Finance Department's budget, showcasing a $3.6 million reduction due to contract non-renewals and debt payoff, alongside efforts to improve asset management and procurement processes. The Community Engagement Department presented its budget, proposing a full-time translator and a broadcast specialist, while also addressing concerns about procurement efficiency, website refresh plans, and the cautious exploration of AI in constituent services. Councilors consistently praised staff for their hard work and responsiveness throughout the condensed budget process, while also requesting a 'post-mortem' to refine the process for future years and ensure adequate time for in-depth departmental discussions. == Key Decisions == - Approved the agenda for the special meeting. - The Governing Body will need to make a determination on how to utilize the $250,000 budgeted for potential council staffing after Baker Tilly presents its recommendations in mid to late June. - The Governing Body needs to provide direction on the cadence and process for convening future legislative study sessions. == Motions & Votes == - Approval of Agenda — Passed by roll call vote == Public Comment == The Mayor emphasized the importance of unity and gratitude for city staff. Councilor Castro praised the HR department for maintaining health coverage and flat premiums, and for increased training opportunities, while also highlighting the need for clear career ladders and financial advancement for city employees. The Municipal Court representative thanked the administration and finance staff for outstanding communication. Councilor Castro relayed community comments about the city being "top-heavy" with administration, which Councilor Casset defended by emphasizing the critical work of the City Manager's office. Councilor Casset also expressed concerns about the length of the city's procurement process and the cost of the shopping cart contract, advocating for retailer responsibility. Councilor Fagali requested a centralized calendar for all Plaza events. Councilor Castro expressed gratitude for proposed full-time positions in Community Engagement but cautioned against AI replacing human interaction in constituent services. Councilors universally praised staff for their hard work and responsiveness during the condensed budget process, while also suggesting improvements for future budget cycles. == Topics == - Budget Process Improvements - Employee Training & Development - Human Resources Budget - Staff Retention & Growth - Employee Benefits & Wellness - City Efficiency & Operations - HCM System Management - Public Application System - Governing Body Collaboration - Remembrances and Condolences == Full Transcript == Call today's special governing body meeting to order. We will start off with a Pledge of Allegiance led by Councilor Fagali, salute to the New Mexico flag led by Councilor Lee Garcia, and invocation remembrances led by Councilor Chavez. Please stand as you're able. I really wanted to take this time to acknowledge our leadership in the city and the staff that is doing the work. And I wanted to bring this up because we've had an admin change, and I think with change can come great challenges, but also an opportunity for unity. I think that what brings us together and helps our success is when we can arrive unitedly. And I think our Santa Fe team members are an example of that. We've had our staff, our Santa Fe city team, coming together, working very hard, especially around budget season, which is the craziest time, having to come to us, have these conversations, answer bunches of questions, devote tons of time, and they do it for the community, the dedication for leading our city in a positive direction of service and of just meeting need. So, I want to really shine light on the need to be grateful for those that put in the work to keep our city functioning, and those that arrive in a time of change to unite for the good of others outside themselves. Thank you, Mayor. Mayor: Any remembrances from the governing body? Councilor: Got two. One, Katherine Raing, she was a longtime former finance director for the City of Santa Fe. And so, I just want to send out our condolences to her and to any of the colleagues that had worked with Katherine, as well as, it's always troubling when we lose somebody very young. And so, I just want to acknowledge the passing of Juniper Blessing. Juniper graduated from the New Mexico School for the Arts last year, was attending school in Seattle, and had such a bright future. So, it's always tough. So, apologize. Any other remembrances from folks? Marcos, City Attorney: Thank you, Mayor, members of the governing body. I just want to remember my father who passed away a year ago today. He's a veteran and is buried in the Santa Fe National Cemetery. Mayor: Any others? Councilor: I'd like to remember the life of a cousin of mine, just passed away a night before last in a motorcycle accident in Rancho, west side of Albuquerque. Always positive, always a great big smile, and never left a conversation without saying, "Puro Amore." Got nothing but love. Amoreo Ortiz. Anybody else? Councilor Casset: Thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to recognize the anniversary of the death of Candace Tomatic. She was a very, very, very dear friend of mine, and somebody that I spent a lot of my life with and a mentor for me when I was in high school. And she passed away in, gosh, 2002. So, I miss her and think about her every single year and just want to honor her today. Thank you. Mayor: Thank you. Anybody else? Let's just take a moment to think of those in our community that need our help and support. Thank you. Madam City Clerk: Can we get a roll call, please? Councilor: Mr. here. Madam City Clerk: Councilor Bamante. Councilor Bamante: Here. Madam City Clerk: Councilor Casset. Councilor Casset: Here. And just for reference, I'm about to jump onto a different device, so I'll be here again in a moment. Madam City Clerk: Okay. Councilor Castro. Councilor Castro: Present. Madam City Clerk: Councilor Chavez. Councilor Falner. Councilor Falner: Here. Madam City Clerk: Councilor Fagali. Councilor Fagali: Here. Madam City Clerk: Councilor Garcia. Councilor Garcia: Here. Madam City Clerk: Mayor Garcia. Mayor Garcia: Present. Madam City Clerk: Mayor, you have a quorum. Mayor: Thank you. So, next up is, can you read us the item agenda, please, Madam City Clerk? Madam City Clerk: Do you want to do approval of the agenda? Mayor: Oh, yeah. Sorry, I skipped that one. Madam City Clerk: No problem. Mayor: Any changes from governing body members? Councilor: Move to approve. Councilor: Second. Mayor: Okay, we've got a motion and a second. Any discussion? Can we get a, oh, no. All in favor? No, we've got somebody online. So, roll call vote, please. Madam City Clerk: Certainly, Mayor. Councilor Bamante. Councilor Bamante: Yes. Madam City Clerk: Councilor Casset. Councilor Casset: Yes. Madam City Clerk: Councilor Castro. Councilor Chavez. Councilor Falner. Councilor Falner: Yes. Madam City Clerk: Councilor Faggali. Councilor Faggali: Yes. Madam City Clerk: Councilor Garcia. Councilor Garcia: Yes. Madam City Clerk: Motion passed. Next item on the agenda is item seven, fiscal year 2027 operating budget hearings. Mayor: Okay. With that, I'll hand it over to our interim city manager. Interim City Manager: Mr. Mayor, thank you. We'll start with HR. So, if you'd like to come up to the table and we'll get started. Oh, sorry about that. Thank you. Sarah Boliter Gonzalez: Good morning, Mayor Garcia and members of governing body. I'm Sarah Boliter Gonzalez. I am the Interim Human Resources Director. This morning, I have with me Erica Monttoano, the Human Resources Organizational Development Manager. She is in charge of training for the City of Santa Fe. And also with me, Alvin Valdez, the Benefits and Wellness Manager, who oversees all of benefits and wellness for the City of Santa Fe. The Human Resources Fiscal Year 27 budget is consistent with previous year's goals, which is to support the City of Santa Fe employees. The proposed budget increased by 1.4 million or 4.4% from the original budget. The proposed budget includes 25.7 million for employee health, dental, and life insurance claims and associated costs, and $197,848 for employee tuition assistance and training costs. The proposed budget also includes the funding of a new FTE, which if approved, will be the Human Resources Information Systems, or HRIS, Manager. Our goal with the requested position is for HR to become independent from contractors to have the freedom to work directly with our vendor, pardon me, to make necessary changes to our Human Capital Management, HCM, system and reduce the overall amount of funds the city is currently allocating to contracted work. We anticipate this position assisting with making human resources processes more efficient by prioritizing the development and training of human resources staff to perform essential HR functions such as mass salary change imports, mass position changes, benefit rates changes, and module expansions such as recruiting employee tasks and training and improving the public-facing application system. With that, we yield for any questions from governing body. Thank you. Mayor: Are there any questions from governing body members? Councilor Castro. Councilor Castro: Hello. Thank you so much, Director. Thank you, Mayor. I do have a few questions just about the contracts because I know in the past we've had contracts for very specific things, like maybe process management or big projects in updating our policies. What kinds of contracts were you using and what are we moving away from? Sarah Boliter Gonzalez: Thank you, Mayor Garcia, Councilor Castro, for the question. Currently for HCM contracts management, we utilize HR utilizes its outside contract with Cyber Pathway to rely on contracted subject matter experts. Our overall goal is to reduce that contracted allocation. Councilor Castro: Thank you so much. And I realize that you've given us spreadsheets and we don't need to go into details, but I appreciate that. So, it's more technology that we're moving away from. Sarah Boliter Gonzalez: Exactly. Councilor Castro: Thank you so much. And I also wanted to just praise Alvin. I know that we just had a big change and we had some concerns about coverage, and I'm checking in with folks. It seems like coverage hasn't changed. But if it does or premiums go up, we just would like to be aware soon. Alvin Valdez: Mr. Mayor, Councilor Castro, there will be no change plan design changes for FY27. Our premium rates are remaining flat, and there was only a small budget increase to pharmacy as HR spoke to. So, we have the budget to cover it. Everything's remaining the same, and everything should work just as well. I think a highlight of this year, just so that you all know, is that as of our current state, we are in the black. We have a current surplus of $1.52 million, and we only have three quarters of the plan year remaining. So, we will stay in the black and we will have a surplus for four years in a row. Councilor Castro: Thank you so very much. Appreciate you. And Erica, you're doing a wonderful job seeing a lot of more trainings. I have no further questions, Mayor. Thank you. Mayor: Thank you, Councilor. Councilor Chavez. Councilor Chavez: Thank you. In regards to the mentorship and training, are we incentivizing through, are we incentivizing with pay or stipends or anything like that as they advance in training, or what is the ladder for them to grow within the city? Sarah Boliter Gonzalez: Thank you, Mr. Mayor and Councilor Chavez. Great question. We would like to explore a mentorship incentive. It is very important to me. Working with APSME and the collective bargaining units, we will be needing to go into negotiations on a new contract with APSME in the next calendar year, and that is something we would like to prioritize. There is currently no incentives. We are working with APSME on new tiered systems for classifications. That is also something that's really important in growing our reduced vacancies. Councilor Chavez: Yeah, I think that it would be well because we've heard this like the entire time that I've had my seat, when we've talked about staff advancement, there's been a lack of tier, right? And it's a balance because it's hard. You want to create these ladders for staff, but then they have to come with accountability. And sometimes the accountability portion, people don't like. And I don't, you can't have successful advancement that way without accountability and measurements of performance. And all of those things make people really uncomfortable. But I imagine that there's a lot of models out there that can do it effectively or have done it effectively. I'd be happy to explore some of those so that when we do have those conversations with APSME, we're not trying to build something that doesn't have some data or support or evidence behind it as being effective. Because there are a lot of tiered models. There's a lot of performance type indicators that do come with training opportunities and coaching and can come from more of a place of support and professional advancement than feel punitive. So, I would love to explore that. I really would like the city to have a model that shows that our employees can come here and grow and find more stability as they advance financially. And I don't think that that's there. Like they can't see that in the future, and that's a huge problem with some of our retention. So, if I would be happy to explore that. Thank you. Erica Monttoano: Thank you, Councilor Chavez. I want to piggyback off of that because being the training manager, I would probably disagree with that. And with our current training policy that's just gone into effect, that will really support staff in getting that training opportunity, that goal advancement, that career advancement. So, when we see employees that maybe are coming into an entry level, we send them and they, we give them the opportunity to go get a college degree. That's going to give them their, their level of expertise to get into a manager position with that level of, it's done job descriptions. I'm sorry, the level of educational needs. Right. So, again, as we've developed this training policy, which took years for us to get approved, that will really support our staff in moving up and having that career development and opportunity in our agency. So, that's really something that we work closely on, but also something that we need the support of our leadership, which in the past there wasn't support. And so again, with a training policy, that will really help take the accountability of, hey, we have to have trainings, you have to attend. Well, now you attend and then look, you can have a certificate to show that you can be in a leadership position. You can grow with the organization. That's amazing. I think that's great. I think that's a very important piece. I do also think we have a lot of people who do not want to be managers or supervisors in order to get that pay increase and have the performance and may be committed to time. So, looking at tiered systems like you mentioned are really effective in capturing those individuals where they can advance due to their output of work, due to their service, but not necessarily have to take on a supervisor manager role in order to kind of fill the compensation that comes with that performance and service to the city. But I think the training is huge. Education opportunities for any organization to build education opportunities and professional certification opportunities is huge because it's really hard to seek outside of work. So, when your work and the time that you're giving kind of creates those opportunities within it, it's huge. So, thank you for that. Absolutely support it. Thank you. Any other questions, governing body members? Not seeing any. So, with that, thank you for the time this morning. I appreciate all the work that you do. Thank you for having us. Okay. Next up, we have General Government. First on the docket, pun intended, is Municipal Court. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for having me. First of all, I want to start off by thanking the administration and finance staff. The communication was outstanding. I've enjoyed the budget process and working with everyone. So, thank you to the administration. Our budget, the court's budget, has two main focused areas. Number one, staff, mostly salaries. We do have incentive pay for our language access specialists and interpreting court that increase access to the public. We also been doing a lot of training, and this budget reflects the training that I'd like to send the staff to and keep that ongoing, not only for the staff but for myself as well. The second part of the budget, I would say, is the public safety aspect, which includes all of our programs, maintaining the Mesa Vista Wellness treatment for our drug court program. In addition to that, all the other drug court, excuse me, the programs that include drug testing, et cetera, our electronic monitoring program, which is in lieu of jail. Someone can be under house arrest, et cetera, where they can still go to work and those types of things and leave their work requirements. I stand for questions. Any questions from governing body members? Not seeing any, and I'm not seeing any online. So, I think, thank you. Thank you very much. See everyone. Appreciate it. Next up is the City Council portion of the budget. Sure. Right. Good morning. Thank you for having me. I will try to present the details on the City Council budget. There's honestly not a whole lot there. It's your salary and benefits for the City Council members. There is a little bit of funding in here for some basic supplies and travel and training. And then probably the biggest thing to point out here is that the placeholder of $250,000 is included for potential council staffing. So, just so you all are aware, we're still working with Baker Tilly on that assessment. They're going to be presenting their recommendations and their findings to you coming up probably in either mid to late June. And so, based on that, you'll need to, I guess, make a determination of how you want to utilize those funds. We've got $250,000 budgeted. It's right now in professional services, and we can certainly move that into staffing. Interestingly, there was a position that is frozen. It's called a Council Liaison. So, we already kind of have the makings of a job description. If we can certainly look at that depending on the direction of the City Council. So, that's pretty much the budget there for City Council, and I'll stand for questions. Questions from governing body members? Councilor Castro. Thank you so much, Mayor. Thank you, Deputy City Manager. We touched on this a little bit, but we have some separate funds that come from other departments that are not reflected here. Is there any move for us to sort of expand what we can use those funds for or have some sort of discretionary fund in the future? Mayor Garcia, Councilor Castro, and members of the governing body. My understanding is that there is funding within Arts and Culture per district. You also have the ability to sponsor some special events. There may be other funds that you're referring to within the departments, or are those the two that? Those are the two that I'm aware of. And now that you bring it up, I'm so sorry. Are there any other funds that we can sort of tap into as governing body? Not that I am aware of, but I would defer to Andy Hopkins if he's aware of any other funding sources where city councilors have spending authority for their districts. And while Andy's coming down, and maybe Andy can ask this, answer this question. So, there are set aside resources for councilors for travel, training, et cetera, but it's not solely explicit. It's kind of just allocations to them. Could that be used for council district priorities and barred over? So, I mean, it ultimately would have to be moved to the appropriate entity that would expend it. But maybe Andy, you can help give a further clarification. Mr. Chair, governing body members, yes, you could theoretically take the council appropriations, which I think are $25,000 per councilor or $20,000, I can't remember which. Andre, maybe correct me. Is it within the City Council budget? It'll be the, I think there's a pink tab in there that has that. Or maybe you're looking at the... I have the ones that they, yeah, I have the PDF. One of my staff can maybe look that up for me. But yes, that can be theoretically moved to wherever you'd like to be spent however you like. It would just require, if it's crossing funds or departments into a different, you know, if you were wanting to spend it somewhere outside of General Government and/or outside the General Fund, it would require a BAR. I'm sorry, just point of clarification. Can we get those numbers again? The individual councilor allocations are $11,800, a total of $94,000. And yes, I mean, you could, you could spend that on pretty much whatever you like. It just might require a BAR to move the money around to where it needs to be. Thank you so much. No further questions for me at this time, Mayor. Any other questions from governing body members? See any online or in the chambers? So, with that, thank you, Deputy City Manager. We'll go ahead and go to the City Attorney's Office. Thank you, Mayor, members of the governing body. Good morning. It's my pleasure to present the proposed fiscal year 2027 budget for the City Attorney's Office. Our office remains dedicated in its mission to advise, defend, and protect the City of Santa Fe while enforcing its laws in a way that's both timely and just. Before going into any detail, it's worth looking at some of the litigation victories that protect the city's policy priorities that we've had in the past year. Most notably, we prevailed in this Hill versus City of Santa Fe case, which was the first major challenge to our high-end excise tax. New Mexico Supreme Court upheld the dismissal of that case on the grounds that the plaintiffs lack standing. And the fight continues with more recent case of Cash versus the City of Santa Fe. We also effectively ended three years of litigation in the Bruce Throne case, clearing the way for a 9.6-acre development that includes much-needed affordable housing. Additionally, we secured preliminary favorable decision and a challenge regarding the city's conditions that the city sets for water service. And beyond the courtroom, we've made strides in transparency and efficiency. Going back to 2024, we processed over 10,800 public records requests. By 2025, that number dropped to roughly 7,800. Not because we're doing less, but because we provided that information to the public more directly via a dedicated accident report page, reducing the administrative burden for formal IPRA filings. And of course, the legislation and policy team does critical work, realizes the policy goals of the governing body in the form of legislation. With that, I'll stand for any questions. I have with me, of course, Katherine RC. Thank you. Any questions from the governing body members? Councilor Vigil. Thank you, Mayor. I think this is probably for Marcy, but it says in here that you want to work with the governing body to hold more study sessions aimed at improving legislative and programmatic efficiencies throughout the city. We had one. Do you have a, do you have a plan for how we can have more? Mayor, councilors, I was hoping that we would have study sessions to dig into items legislatively where there was overlap in your interest in different topics. And I have a question about how those are convened. I think that in our procedural rules, they say that the City Manager's Office convenes a special meeting. And so I think what we might want to do is establish a process for how and when we bring those together. And we had a really good study session where I think we had some good conversation about, you know, ideas for streamlining the processes. And I think that was like a beta test, kind of one of our first inaugural study sessions, and I walked away from that thinking we need to do a collaborative effort to figure out how those are convened. So, I think that's a first step. Okay. Does that answer your question? City Manager, do you, do you have thoughts on, hold on, Chief, just because I know this is an Andrea question. She was helping to facilitate all of this. And while she's coming down, so, as folks may remember during that meeting that Marcy was mentioning, we, we had thought we had lined up. And so this is study session question. And so I think we as a body just need to determine the cadence because we, there were some of us that walked away from that meeting, thought we had developed a, at least a next meeting schedule, and we did the presentation a month or so ago, and then we had it moved the ball forward in study session. So, Yeah, thank you, Mr. Mayor, and members of the governing body. Sorry, I'm getting feedback from this, but the legislative team did put together a really comprehensive package of where committees appear within the municipal code and charter. And we sent that out to you for your review. There was some concern, I think, about making sure that whatever changes, if those study sessions were to supplant the, if the study sessions were to take the place of some of the other committee meetings, what would that do to our business process and stuff? Thank you. Appreciate that. So, yeah, I think we're just maybe waiting for some direction from the governing body. I think there was some concern about just making sure that the business of the committees continues to move forward and trying to get those scheduled. So, we, we await the direction from, from governing body and certainly are happy to provide information on specific topics. I know housing, special events, there's a lot, water supply, there's a lot, there's a whole host of topics that have come forward on that. Procedural rules, I think, might have been another one at some point, but... Thank you. That was it for me. Any other, Councilor Castro? Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, City Attorney, and thank you to the team. Briefly, I want to sort of understand, this is not a significant increase in your budget, and yet we have a significant increase in work for your office, or at least that's what it feels. from this side of the day is how are we dealing with the amount and volume? Are we going to look at some sort of implementation of technology or a new, I know that we're losing someone and we're going to try to replace that position. How are we dealing with the volume? Well, with respect to IPRA, and Katherine can speak to this more thoroughly, we've collaborated with the police department to try to shift some of the responsibility for police video back to the police department with a common sort of training that Katherine will lead for the police department. So, we saw a significant impact to IPRA in particular based on just the volume, the tremendous volume and amount of data that is now collected by police video and that is regularly requested. It poses an undue burden on the City Attorney's Office and her team in particular, and I think they were suffering from some potentially some burnout, and it was a bit too much to manage. So, police will be adding an additional position. We'll be giving up one position. I think they'll all be cross-trained together so that we're playing from the same rules and trying to apply the same law. So, that's one way we're trying to address the vast amount of work that the City Attorney's Office encounters. We are always looking at ways that technology can improve our processes. We want to hopefully undertake a way that will make our contract processing more efficient so that we can get to the work of the city more efficiently, help the departments who need contractors who fill in work that the city doesn't have particular specialization in. So, if you have ideas, please let me know. But those are some of the ways, and I'd like to just let Katherine speak a little bit to the IPRA challenges. Thank you, Mayor, and Councilor Castro for the question. As far as staffing challenges in IPRA, one of the new platforms that we're using, GovQA, has the capability to track time spent with each request. So, in reviewing those numbers before coming down here this morning, in tracking over the last month or so, we have spent a collective 138 hours of video review. This is also tracking other duties done by the records custodians. So, that 138 hours is on top of the 417 hours they have spent so far of their tracking continuing to fulfill other requests. I think one of the important things to highlight, the biggest reason that we decided to collaborate with the police department is because they have more training in the types of videos that they're reviewing, which has become a bit of an obstacle for the IPRA team in order to keep these positions filled. There's no trigger warning for the videos that the team sees ahead of time without reviewing those, and the police department does have more training in those types of incidents and can reduce the vicarious trauma that is implemented on the team. As far as the number, to speak to the number that Marcos mentioned earlier, we did decrease the number of IPRA requests we received, but with that number of time spent on each request, it does feel like we are spending a lot more time on fulfilling these requests and just receiving requests. Another trend that we have seen is requesters from out of state or requesters who are submitting false information that we can verify and we'll close the request. But we do receive a lot of out-of-state requesters requesting voluminous information in each request. So, I think it's also important to highlight that the number of requests doesn't capture the volume of records that are being requested in each request. Thank you so much, Katherine. I know, going to the staffing challenges portion, we heard a little bit from public safety about the mental health services and self-care that we might need to support. Will some of these folks now that they're in PD potentially have access to some of those resources? That is my understanding. Yes, Councilor Castro. Legislative services, also a large volume. We continuously add to your plate, and your team is small but mighty, and we're losing a very key part of that team. What's the plan? Is the staffing enough? We've heard about some incentives that we could potentially use to get young people trained and some supplemental support. Just a high-level overview, please. Thank you for the question, Councilor Castro, Mayor. I'm very excited to say that we have officially offered the job. A contingent offer letter has been sent to a woman that I actually had as a St. John's intern, and I recruited her. That's wonderful. So, she'll be starting in June. I think you're speaking about Christine Spears, who I have taken. She was an entry-level person. Her job was like legislative administrative type work, and then she worked her way into something more along the lines of a coordinator. She helps me process and manage projects. Now, she is one of my main point people for our grants and resolutions, our grants. So, anything, any ordinance or resolution that's associated with money, she's gotten really good at processing those. So, she kind of helps me manage certain projects. So, I'm going to bring in an entry-level person, and then when she departs, we'll fill her position also. I think that this is a great start, but I will say that I think we need to continue. It's not just people. People are always helpful, but it's also continuing to look at our systems and how can we as a team, I think we're a little bit unique, and I really do mean our office with you all, we are so very much a team. I think that we really do kind of need to work together to think about ways to streamline stuff so that my office is serving you all as cleanly and efficiently as possible while maintaining good quality work. So, I mean, we've played with AI. Actually, Christine did an AI resolution, and I have to tell you, it wasn't, it wasn't great. There were some, we had to clean it up. We had to babysit those robots a bit. So, I don't know, you mentioned something about a digital enhancement technology. Really anything. You're the expert. Anything in your realm. I know that these are large documents that sometimes we have issues with converting from a PDF to a Word document. Oh yeah, right. Yes. So, like the supreme example, of course, is our Chapter 14, which was 700-some pages, and that was not ideal. But I think that we are, we can continue to think about ways to make it smooth. One of the things I think we're going to do moving forward with those kind of projects, hundreds of pages, is chunk them into more manageable sizes so that we don't have issues like Maggie and I are sitting there waiting for the PDF to make for hours. So, not that. So, we are working on things like that. Oh, and thank you. Marcos just reminded me, we passed a bill for scrivener's errors. That's going to help us a lot, actually. Now we don't have to write a bill or a resolution every time we need to make a tiny, a grammatical, a non-substantive kind of change. Does that? Yeah, and I think just to follow up with that, one thing that we have sort of made a priority is efficiency, and anything that we can help you with legislatively to update the process and make it more efficient, please reach out to us. No further questions, Mayor. Councilor, any other questions? Any online or here in the chamber? So, thank you, City Attorney team. Next up is Mayor's Office, City Manager, Internal Audit. Thank you. Good to see you again. Just a reminder that general government is kind of a mashup of several different administrative areas of the city. So, the Mayor's Office, City Council, City Manager, City Attorney, which you just heard, Municipal Court is also included within general government, Risk Management, and Safety. So, should we go maybe first to the Mayor's Office? The Mayor's Office includes just staffing for three individuals. Right now, it is, of course, the Mayor's salary, an executive assistant, and there is funding for the position that was held by Rod Gold, which is a public engagement coordinator and senior advisor. So, that position is currently vacant, and we're working with the Mayor's Office over the coming weeks to analyze the staffing needs within the City Manager's Office and the Mayor's Office, and we may be bringing forward some additional changes to that as we look at kind of how things are shaking out with the new reorg. So, also within the Mayor's Office is, I'm sorry, let me just get to the details here. Let's see here. Also within the Mayor's Office, of course, supplies. We do have a placeholder in here for $37,500. And this says it's for participatory budgeting. I think we're still trying to determine what exactly does that mean. I know there's been a major emphasis recently in providing more community engagement, and whether that's through a dashboard or through additional community engagement process, we wanted to set aside a placeholder so that we could continue to do more of that. So, it could be for software, consulting, public engagement sessions, et cetera. So, we do have a placeholder for that. We also have funding set aside within the Mayor's Office for advertising, printing, publishing, and I think New Mexico Municipal League, which the city is a member of, is also budgeted within the Mayor's Office as well. So, I'll stand for any question. Any questions from governing body members? Councilor Cassutt. Thank you so much, Mayor. And thank you, Deputy City Manager and City Manager. I wanted to follow up a little bit on that participatory budgeting line item. It sounds like it's potentially able to be used for a more broader, a more broad category than just budgeting, right? So, like, I mean, would this be like where the money comes for community engagement around the micro-communities, or is that sitting within community services? Mayor Garcia, Councilor Cassutt, members of the governing body, that's a great question, and to be honest, we haven't fully defined the scope of that work yet. We're hoping to work with the Mayor and City Manager over and the budget team, of course, as we move forward to see what that might look like. I think we got a lot of good participation from the public engagement session that we held back in January, and there could be an opportunity to do more of that throughout the year. We're also looking at some different dashboards. As you saw with the Excel, Adobe Excel spreadsheets that I sent out, that's what we're currently using to track all of our performance metrics. So, maybe not ideal. But there may be an opportunity to do some kind of public-facing dashboard. So, without knowing the full details, we just put a placeholder in there for at this time, but I'm happy to continue to explore that and report back to the council. Okay, wonderful. That would be helpful. In my brain, participatory budgeting refers to a very specific process, and maybe that's just because it's the only process that I've heard of. So, it might be nice to open up that line item just so if somebody's looking at the budget book and if they have that same thought that I do, but maybe it's something around like, you know, public engagement around, you know, governmental, I don't know, but something that opens it up a little bit so that because right now for me, I'm like, oh, participatory budgeting. We did that with my very specific piece. It would be helpful to maybe just give it a broader title in case anyone's looking at it and wondering what that could potentially be or even has some ideas for how we could utilize that. Mayor: Thank you for that. Appreciate it. Councilor: Thank you. Councilor Castro: Yeah, I also had similar questions. And I just wanted a little bit more clarity about that position that isn't filled. What does it do? How would we best utilize that position if it was filled? Deputy City Manager: I might defer to the Mayor on that. We've been having some discussions about the leadership needs here at the city and how we can best utilize some of the vacant positions that we have. And to be honest, with the reorg just being approved last month, and now the City Manager has 16 direct reports, I think, and that's just departments, not people. So there's a need to maybe just look at the shuffling of those duties, who's going to be managing what within that portfolio, and then there may be an opportunity to turn that position into something that can be more supportive of the City Manager and the Mayor's office in terms of project implementation, special projects, and things like that. So, I know that sounds very vague right now. We're really wanting to be thoughtful about what our needs are. So, I know in working with the Chief and with the Mayor, they've got some ideas on how we could best implement this, but we'll definitely be bringing information back to you as we look at those. Councilor Castro: Thank you so much. Because, on occasion, we hear a lot of comments in the community about having too much administration and being very top-heavy. And so I'd like to be able to have an answer of these specific roles and how we're able to leverage the workforce that we have through some of these positions. So thank you very much and no further questions. Mayor: Sure. Just to follow up on that, I think the Deputy City Manager hit the nail on the head. We're trying to be much more efficient with the positions that we currently have without creating new positions. And so, one of the roles with that position that currently sits within the Mayor's office, it's blended in time. And to give a historical context, this position started off as a neighborhood coordinator position many, many years ago, and then I believe it was in 2022, it then got somehow blended into a neighborhood coordinator, senior advisor, and then it blended in time to a different role under former team member Bernie Tune, and then it blended a little more under Rod Golden. So, what we want to do is utilize that to both support the needs of the Mayor's office as well as the City Manager's office. And the immediate thought was, well, there's a lot of work that we want to get done at the city level. And maybe this can be a special projects coordinator because we don't want, I'll be blunt, I don't need a senior advisor. So, how do I utilize this position to support the city holistically? And so, as Andrea mentioned, now that the reorg has been approved, we're now looking at where the gaps are, where we can utilize the existing support and leverage that. So, more to come. Happy to provide you with an update as we finalize what that role will look like. So, any other questions? Councilor Casset. Councilor Casset: Yeah, thank you so much, Mayor. I just want to, I know, Councilor Castro, you brought up the point that there's always this conversation around the city being so top-heavy. Just for the public, I don't think they understand how much the City Manager's office has to take on. We had a lot of resistance for even getting a Deputy City Manager, and a really well-run, really focused City Manager's office like we have right now, I mean, they need support and they do so much and their leadership is so crucial for so much of what we're looking at in terms of how we integrate. And so, I'm really happy that we're looking at how this position can really support that kind of top level. And that really does assist with how the rest of the city functions and being able to lead on some of these multi-departmental projects that result in better efficiencies for the city and better results for the public. So, I know that that's a frequent comment and I just wanted to state for the record as somebody who does get to watch City Managers and watching this team, just the incredible amount of effort and the incredible amount of work that comes out of the City Manager's office, I don't think is fully comprehended by anybody who's not really getting to take a deep look into this. So, I'm very supportive in figuring out how that position can really help with a lot of what this Mayor and the City Manager have been talking about, Deputy City Manager, for efficiencies with the city because at the end of the day, it really does mean better service for the community. So, I know that's often a conversation. So, just wanted to put that on the record that I don't think people always see how much really has to go into this job for it to really have a wonderful impact on all of us and our job, but more importantly, city staff and the community at large. So, I look forward to hearing more about the plans that the Mayor and the City Manager and Deputy City Manager have for this position. Thank you, sir. Mayor: Any other questions or comments? Okay, thank you both. Appreciate it. Last up under general government is risk and safety. Deputy City Manager: Oh, are we going one by one? Maybe I could, Mr. Mayor, if I could maybe just quickly touch on City Manager's office and internal audit. Would that be okay? Mayor: Absolutely. Deputy City Manager: So, City Manager's office, of course, includes the two positions of City Manager, Deputy City Manager. We also have our Administrative Manager Bernice Senna. We have a vacant Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Coordinator position that I was hoping to fill once I'd had a chance to talk to you all about this important body of work. I think we've got some great initiatives coming forward with the Safer Spaces initiative and of course we're getting ready to celebrate Pride Month. But we've been talking about inclusion in general throughout the city and how we can fold this into what we do through our HR training, through our policies and programs and how we can welcome people into our city facilities which is part of our Safer Spaces initiative that we're going to be presenting to you on next month and that's with our HR. And we also have a split-funded position for Equity and ADA Coordinator. They're funded partially within the City Manager's office and then the rest of that is in Public Works. Also within the City Manager's office is frankly things that don't really fit elsewhere. So we do have money for food. For example, we've got money for some travel training and dues. We did put a little bit of a placeholder in for frankly a contingency of about $200,000. What we find is that things come up throughout the year and people are saying they don't have money within their division budgets and so we're scrambling to find money. This would provide an opportunity if we have something pressing that comes up, small purchases, you know, we have a motor that goes out or something like that that we can't readily find money for, that's where we would be able to potentially pull it from. And so I'll turn it over to City Manager Moya if he's got some additional highlights that he wants to talk about with the City Manager's office. City Manager Moya: Mr. Mayor, Councilors, can you hear me? Okay. So, I just want to highlight that $200,000. We did have an issue this year with the bike racks and we couldn't find money. So, I think it's really, really pressing. We don't have a big budget, but what we can look at is stuff in an emergency situation we can immediately address. So, I really like that we put that in there. It'll really help out citywide, really help out you guys. If you have an immediate need, we know we have. So, I just wanted to highlight that in our budget. And just to touch base on what the Mayor said about that other position in his office, we have really took a deep dive. We've also asked other communities. We had Vegas, the City of Vegas here, and they gave us some great ideas. They have somebody like that. It would really help even the Councilors because if we had to go into a rabbit hole down the road, we could use this person to do that. So we're really stretched. We don't really have time to do those things. So, I think in the coming months we could definitely have a conversation about this position and moving it forward in a positive direction to help out the city as a whole or even help out directors if we get directors into an issue and they need extra hands or extra abilities. So, I just wanted to highlight those little things before I handed back the mic. So, if not, we'll have any more other questions for us. Mayor: Any questions regarding the City Manager budget? Yes, Councilor Faggali. Councilor Faggali: The Manager, could you just remind what position was that? I'm sorry, I missed the beginning of. City Manager Moya: The DEI Coordinator position and also the previous Rod Gold's position. Councilor Faggali: Okay. City Manager Moya: We're looking at what specifically we could do to do better with that position and help out citywide and help out both offices and you guys as well. Councilor Faggali: Okay. Was that, was that all five positions that you have in your office? I counted four. City Manager Moya: I'm sorry. And Peter Olsen is our Communications Director, I think, was his title. Councilor Faggali: So, he's also in that office. City Manager Moya: Yes. Thank you. As well as a little portion of Daniel's budget as well. So, some of Daniel Lopez's budget salaries covered from City Manager budget. Any other questions? Don't see any online. So, we'll go ahead and move to internal audit. Deputy City Manager: Okay. Thank you. The internal audit plan is currently proposed for $200,000. This year was $150,000. That does not include the lodging tax audit which is separately funded. We selected Baker Tilly as our internal audit firm and they are working through our internal audit project plan which you have seen and adopted. We're currently in the process of working through a procurement process audit. We're working on a risk and safety audit although that has been kind of back-burnered a little bit. And we also have our HR recruitment audit going on right now. Baker Tilly is also providing updates to our internal audit committee and they're helping us with ongoing policy work. So one of the things that we know we need to do is capture more of our policies and procedures, our SOPs, and they've been helping to develop things like that for grants management, year-end close, month-end close, those kinds of things. So they're there to help us with implementing the recommendations from the internal audit plan as well. We did increase the internal audit plan in this upcoming budget year by $50,000. The purpose for that is we are supposed to be conducting an annual audit of our franchises. So, we're supposed to be working with a utility each year to ensure that we are capturing all of the funds that are owed to the city through those franchise agreements. So, we'll be, if approved, we'll be embarking on that process as well next year and happy to answer any questions you have about internal audit. Questions from governing body members? None. And I'm not seeing any online either. Thank you. Now we can move to risk and safety. Thank you so much. So, risk and safety is another area that reports directly to the City Manager's Office. I've been working closely with our staff there. We are budgeted for six employees within risk and safety, which is a mashup of two divisions: the risk side and the safety side. We know that we want to do more with our safety, and that's everything from ensuring the safety of our employees when they're out on the job site to ensuring that we have a safe place for our community to experience our public infrastructure. So, ensuring that we're doing the code enforcement, making sure that sidewalks are well-kept and maintained. All of that kind of thing comes back to us in the way of claims handling and hopefully trying to avoid future claims by ensuring that we're doing that preventive maintenance. We do have plans. We're analyzing the staff right now. June is the opportunity where our HR department has given us a window to look at job descriptions, and so we are doing that with the staff there. We've got some good ideas on how we might move some things around and maybe staff it differently depending on the evolving needs that we have because we really do want to revamp the safety side of the house. The City Manager has been very excited about moving forward on getting the safety team up and running again. This is a cross-departmental group of management and union members who will be meeting regularly to talk about issues with safety that they're seeing and help us get resolution on that. So, we're going to be setting that up here shortly. We're also doing building safety, health, life, and safety inspections once again with our great people in the Fire Marshal's Office. So, we're going to be doing those with our city facilities. So, we're really trying to build back this program that has been understaffed and under-resourced for quite some time. You'll be seeing here in the coming weeks a proposal for our insurance premiums for general liability, workers' comp, and our other lines of business. As you know, AJ Gallagher is our insurance broker. They're shopping our policy around right now, and we'll be bringing that to you in a presentation in the coming weeks. Sir, I'm happy to stand for any questions that you have. Questions from Councilor Castro. Thank you so much, Deputy City Manager. Thank you, Mayor. I think that we heard a little bit about training and compliance earlier with HR. It is a big job. We have a lot of employees. It's hard to manage who is in compliance with their permitting, who has their aggressive driving certificates. I know that we're trying to staff up. Is this enough? Thank you for asking the question. I do think, Councilor, that once we can get these positions filled and kind of revamp the job descriptions to staff up on the safety side, I think we're going to be able to really get back to a good regular cadence of having these discussions and then putting resources aside for PPE and best practices out in the field. We do have OSHA compliance that we need to be mindful of. So, we definitely want our employees first and foremost to go home healthy and safe at the end of the day. And so, that is something that our Workers' Comp Manager, who's also within this office, is constantly looking at. We're working with HR on training. So, we're really excited to keep the momentum moving forward in this area. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. I have a lot of questions. I think I'm probably going to follow up offline because this is a really important department that I know that we're working on actively to support. Good job. And let's continue. Thank you, Councilor. Any other questions? Okay, I'm not seeing any. Thank you so much. Hey, Mayor. Yes. Yes. Go ahead, Councilor K. I apologize. This is a question that's more about the overall general government budget as opposed to this division. Is this an appropriate time to ask that question? Absolutely. The floor is yours, Councilor. Wonderful. Thank you. So, I was just looking over the charts on page 65. I see a large increase in contractuals and utilities and curious what contract would be in there. I don't know if that's, I think that the council study, well that wasn't even that big of a contract, but curious what's in there. I believe that our lobbying contract, I'm going to guess, is in this budget as well. But what increased? Okay, I can try to answer that, but I think we might have to rely on Andy for the details on that increase. But you are right, the lobbying contract is included within the City Manager's budget. Although that was not an increase. I'm just trying to get to the details on that. I was just thinking about what would be in here for contractuals. Okay. Yeah. So, let's see here. So, this is a rollup of all of the contracts that are for all of the different divisions within general government. So, there are several. This was attached. If you want to see the details, this is in the template that was sent out. Sorry, that's a big template. That's okay. We also have... Valid point. I can see. Okay. So, yeah, Andy, I don't know if you have... I can take a look at the templates and then I'll take a closer look there. I was just curious what, I mean, I know that the Mesa Vista Wellness contract would be in there and so I'll take a look. My, I also had the similar question to capital purchases that we had an $81,000 decrease and just curious what the difference is there, what we purchased last year for general government that we are not needing to budget for this year. Here's Andy. Mr. Mayor, Councilor Cassid, the majority of that was the amount that Brian talked about in the City Manager's Office, the $200,000 plus the $250,000 added to the council budget for the staffing study and set aside for personnel. That was also in contractual. Got it. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. That's helpful. That's all. Thanks, Councilor. Okay, let's go ahead and move on to the next group, which is going to be finance. We're going to move to finance. Let me just pull up my spreadsheet here and I'll invite Matt Bonifer down to the table. He is our accounting officer. And of course, we've got Andy Hopkins and the budget team in the back. We've got several folks from the finance team. Travis is our Procurement Manager. I'm going to probably say her name wrong. Dutton Lea, is that right? Dutton La. And then David Harmo in the back is our Fleet Manager. Clarence Romero is our Treasurer. And so, thank you all for being here, Diane. And I, okay. And we've got, yeah, we've got Juan Tapia. So, we've got a whole crew of finance folks here. So, as they make their way down here, let me just grab my notes. Thank you for your patience there. Maybe just a couple quick highlights. Thank you. All right, this is better. Maybe just a couple of highlights. So, as you know, the finance team is a really dedicated group of folks. It's been such a joy to be the Acting Finance Director and get to work closely with these people. They really are excellent team members who care a lot about serving our community and so, yeah, it's just been, it's been a lot of fun just getting in and working with the different units within finance. So, as you know, the finance team not only serves our internal customers, our departments, but they have a crucial role in serving as the stewards of our taxpayer funds. We have a lot of compliance items that we need to be aware of. We have requirements from the state through DFA. We have auditing standards. We have a lot of deadlines that we have to work to on a regular basis. The divisions within finance are administration, accounting, which includes treasury, budget, fleet management, purchasing, and sorry, our Treasurer. Some of the successes that we've had this year are we're continuing to evolve our budget process. Questica software is in the works. We weren't able to utilize it for this budget year, but we are hoping to move from our current system to that software for our next fiscal year. We've had continued implementation of our MUNIS modules. Tyler MUNIS is our enterprise system for financials. We have implemented the capital asset module. Our automated bank reconciliations module is currently in process. So, we continue to try to utilize tools to work smarter and not harder. And we've also, as you know, been able to get up to date with our audits through the hard work of the finance staff and former Finance Director Oster. So, we want to continue that momentum. We are working on resolving any of those outstanding findings and continuing to make progress in that area. In procurement, as I mentioned, we're working on the internal audit process review. We're doing some additional training with our user departments and we're having ongoing discussions about ways to streamline our procurement process so that we can get contracts out the door quicker and get those services out the door because ultimately that's what it's about is being efficient so that we can serve our community. In fleet management, they've implemented the RTA software, which is going to allow them to really get smarter about our assets and develop performance metrics for better fleet management. And then finally, we're getting ready for year-end. So, we're coming up on our fiscal year-end and staff is actively working to gather the information and get ready for that so that we can close out the year smoothly. Upcoming goals is again keeping up to date on our audits just like we did this year. We want to ensure that we are preparing for that year-round and our staff does a great job of ensuring that they're tracking progress and doing that analysis throughout the year so that that is a nice process at the end of the year. We are reviewing our investment policy. Some of you asked about where our investments are. I sent out some information high-level just showing where our cash is invested. And we've also been implementing cash flow analysis and cash sweeps with our bank so that we can get a better return on investment. Currently, we have about $30 to $40 million on average monthly invested, or not sorry, not invested, in cash in our Wells Fargo account. Wells Fargo is our master banking services vendor. We've also been working to evolve our budget book. I know that there have been requests from governing body members and as we talked about earlier with the participatory budget discussion, we really want to make sure that we are doing financial management throughout the year and providing good information to you all so that you can make those strategic decisions. We're working with departments on this OpenGov software implementation. We do have several modules throughout the city, but this is the first one. The planning and land use one is the first one that has a payment portal that we need to have two different interfaces for. One will interface with Tyler MUNIS so that the transactions will be booked or will appear in our general ledger, and we also have one that needs to be built so that it can talk to our banking services. So, we're working on that. It's going to add some complexity, but I think we understand that we are in a hybrid software governance era and we want to be good customer, we want to be good, we want to work with our customer departments and ensure that they are successful. So, we're going to keep moving forward and see how we can do this in a way that provides for financial fidelity in our process while helping that user department. We are also working on improving our grants management. We have a team of four individuals within our grants team that do overall compliance and management for the city. We've talked about perhaps getting an as-needed grants writing contract, and maybe there's some other improvements that we could do not only on the grant writing process but on our management of the grants. We do get a lot of funds from state and federal agencies for a lot of different projects, and so that's an area of constant improvement. Let me see here, that's, yeah, we've got a lot going on. We are budgeted for 58.4 FTEs. As you know, we're excited about our new director coming on in a few weeks. So, she and I will be working together and working with the different departments over the summer to evaluate the city's needs in terms of financials and also really take a look at some of the vacancies we have in our staffing. So, we did have requests from different divisions within finance to add staffing this year, but we did not do it because we wanted to really take a deep dive in terms of the evolving financial needs of the city. So, we wanted to take a look at our cashiering, our accounts receivable, procurement. We might be looking at a different model in the future depending on how that procurement internal audit process comes out. So, I think there's definitely a need to just kind of review our internal staffing plan and determine if there are changes to those job descriptions that we want to make. So, we do have an assistant director vacancy that has been open for several months. We have a controller vacancy. We lost HFA Balden to the utilities division, so we're happy for her, but sad for us. So, we're interviewing folks for that position, and we've brought on some new financial analysts. We know that we need to do more in terms of regular reporting and providing more in the way of capital planning and budgeting beyond our ICIP. So, we are looking at our ability to do some more of that strategic planning support within the department because it is so crucial. Within the budget, we have some contracts for our investment advisor with GPA. Carrie Ziggram is our internal, I'm sorry, not internal auditor, our financial audit firm. We also have funds set aside for software, potential staffing through a staffing agency, it's Quest, and we also have funding for additional training and policy development. One thing I will say is that we are evaluating additional revenue options for the city. This is a project that we hope to report out to you all on later this summer. We know that we have some other things that we could take a look at. We're looking at fees, but we're also looking at other options that we want to bring forward to you for recommendation. So, that's a big project as well. At this point, I'll turn it over to Matt Bonifer if there's anything that you want to add. Matt: No, I think you covered everything I was thinking on top of mind. I think we certainly add more as questions go. Why don't we just turn it over for questions? Thank you. Okay. Thank you, finance team. Any questions from governing body members? Councilor Faulkner. Councilor Faulkner: More of a comment. I just want to thank the finance staff. As finance chair, you guys have helped me learn a lot of awesome things. You've helped me just get through the process as the chair, and I appreciate all of you and everything that you have done. Good work, team. Councilor Casset: Thank you so much, Mayor. Thank you, Andrea and Matt, and thank you to the entire finance team. Andrea, I feel like we should have gotten you however many hats you're wearing so we would know who you were acting as. But really, just as we are now getting a new finance director permanently in, I did want to recognize you and thank you for stepping in. Obviously, you have an incredible team in the finance department that you were able to work with. As this is now, I think, my seventh budget, I counted the other day, I really just really want to thank the finance team. The amount of work and effort that goes in for everybody doing everything to get this put together, to get the budget books printed, to get everything set up, and I mean, it really, it's just such an incredible, incredible amount of work. So, really, really want to thank you all, as well as recognize how many processes you all have taken on over the last few years. I mean, and I know that they've been very public, but with everything that went on with the audits and the amount of changes that this department has seen and improvements that this department has seen, I am really excited to see what is coming next, especially with some of these projects you mentioned. A couple questions about the specific budget. One second, I'm going to be right there. About the specific budget. So, we do, we have a $3.6 million decrease that I'm seeing overall in the finance budget. And it looks like a lot of that can be contributed to, well, there's an almost half a million dollar reduction in contracts, which I'm happy to hear more about. I think that's probably us moving in the right direction with bringing all our audit activities in-house, but would love to hear more about those changes. And then I saw in the budget division specifically, it's a $3.9 million decrease. So, would like to hear more about those numbers. Matt: Mr. Mayor, Councilor Casset, thanks for the question. I'll start with the first point of that, which I think we're pretty proud of here in finance. It's something we've been actively working on is reducing our need for contract workers. This will be the first year we are not renewing our with our external consultant CLA, who have been a fantastic partner for us. But we are finally at the point where we feel very encouraged with the work from the staff, and we're caught up on our audits. So, we are going at it with the staffing in place there. So, that explains the reduction there, at least in the contract services. I'll have Andy speak to the other decrease, which is primarily around our debt reduction. I see him coming to the podium, so I'll let him speak on that. Councilor Casset: Wonderful. Thank you, and congratulations on, again, thank you, CLA. We very much are very grateful for all the work you helped us do, but congratulations to all of you for getting to a place where that's no longer necessary. Very, very proud of all of you for that and grateful. Andy: Mr. Mayor, Councilor Casset. Yes, as Matt mentioned, there was a payoff of debt service. One of, I believe it was the 2021 GRT refunding, was paid down. So, that reduced the need for transfers from budget. Actually owns the or code 3650142, which is the for the half percent capital GRT fund that pays not only our debt service for most of our GRT bonded debt, but also provides for capital and debt service subsidies for other funds that require subsidies. As I outlined briefly yesterday, the main change there on the subsidy side was in the railyard. Not only was one of the railyard's debt issues paid off, so that was no longer needed, but also we had been receiving land rental revenue in railyard, which had not been previously budgeted, but it had been coming in pretty consistently. So, we did recognize that in the budget this year, and of course, that resulted in less need for a subsidy there. So, there are always adjustments from year to year in subsidies from general fund and 365. They tend to fluctuate. This year, they pretty much just went down for those reasons. Those were the main changes. Councilor Casset: All right. Wonderful. Thank you so much. I appreciate, sorry, just, just once, I'll yield the floor for a second. I need to say a quick goodbye. So, thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Sure. We'll go back to you, Councilor. Any other questions from governing body members? Councilor Castro. Councilor Castro: Yes, Councilor Casset took one of my questions. Unfortunately, that 1% was very interesting that it went down. Interesting that we have a negative budget in this case. I wanted to talk a little bit about asset management if we could, and I might be leaning a little bit on Councilor Garcia on this. Airport asset management has been an issue for us for a while. What's the plan there? How do we, I'm assuming we're using technology is what I heard. Matt: Yes. Mr. Mayor, Councilor Castro, so since we last spoke at the conclusion of our FY25 audit, I know continual work has been done on resolving the findings across the city, particularly with our capital asset and those the inventory for our airport. We are two-stage, two-pronged approach right now. We have finally implemented our capital asset module within Tyler, our ERP system. So, we have grown out of Excel spreadsheets for tracking, which are just prone to a lot of data in there, and it makes things look very convoluted. So, we are in the first year of that. That just got kicked off, I would say, around December, January. So, we're in the early stages, but that's being led by our accounting manager of our capital assets, Rebecca, here at the city. And, you know, we're learning through it, but it's coming along great. So, we're encouraged by what we're seeing so far, and there's more to build out there, but it's certainly going to be an advantage for us going forward. But then in our tracking and being able to designate and identify where these assets are, how they were funded, much to what the finding is asking for each of us for how we're spending our money. The second thing that we've done so far is gotten well ahead of what our inventory has been. We have been in catch-up mode. It was something we were rolling out late into the summer, June, July, asking departments to identify inventory, which, you know, needing a quick turnaround on that to submit it to our audit for it left a lot of questions of what is this thing? You know, I have different records and not really making sure it's complete and everything is reconciled between that. So, again, Rebecca has already parsed this information out to the city departments who have inventory and has been actively working with them and taking time. We've identified a set leads in each department. So, someone, maybe it's not the director, but it's someone within the department that she can work with and get the right information other than, "I'm not sure, ask this person. I'm not sure, ask this person." So, those are going well. Those are well underway. I mean, we're still weeks away from our year-end, and there's still work to be done there. I'm encouraged to say that airports is actually one that we have substantial progress on. I think we knew that was one that needed a lot of catch-up. A lot of work has been done by Pette and Kelly before, and Rebecca, to get those things at the airport and Kelly to get those things tightened up. So, encouraged. I think we are in a much, much better spot than we have found ourselves in over the last two, three years, which has led to the issue that we faced. You know, can't say for what will ultimately happen when we get under audits this fall, but I think when we are presenting this information to our auditors, CRI, you know, progress will be at least shown that we have turned a new leaf in terms of attempts and tracking. So, that's sort of where we're at in updated capital asset tracking and inventory. Thank you so much, Mr. Bonifer. And quickly, can you explain to me our negative in the treasury? Are we spending down some of our reserves? Councilor, are you talking about the overall spreadsheet? Yeah. Change the 50, I believe. Yeah, Andy. Mr. Mayor, Councilor Castro, there was a one-time appropriation in last year's budget for a receivables module and a one-stop payment processing system. That was funded by lodgers tax. There is a small amount of lodgers tax going into the treasury. So, because that was a one-time offering, I always say, I think I said to Andrea this year when we're doing comparisons from last year to this year, it's not always about the numerator. Sometimes it's about the denominator. In this case, the denominator was up. So the numerator, the actual amount, went down because last year's was artificially a bit higher. Thank you so much. And Andy, since I have you, Mr. Hopkins, if I have you, almost 50% reduction in lodgers tax, I imagine is a similar, it was that same situation. Exactly. Thank you so much. No further questions from me, Mayor. Thank you, Councilor. Any other questions? We might need to jump back to Councilor Casset. Are you back on? Yes, thank you. I apologize, and I hope that this was not covered. I had stepped out for just a moment. I did want to hear a little more about, and this is probably more of a bike rack around procurement, and really understanding the procurement processes and length. I know that we've been doing some changes to some of our ordinances, but what I hear frequently is procurement is a very long process and understanding where we actually have some control there. I know a lot of this is dictated by the state, as well as I know I've had conversations that even, you know, back to the conversation we were having around study sessions for our processes, that even our committee process can add a number of weeks to procurement, which can be a challenge and really slow down things at the city. So, I'm guessing this would probably be a conversation for another time, a more in-depth. I know that we're getting to 11:30 and we still have one more to go. So, I'll bike rack this for now, but in the future, I would like to get some more information around what changes we're making and what we can expect in terms of making this a more efficient and faster process for everybody in the city. So, thank you. Do you want to give a, I guess just any upcoming changes in the budget year, procurement changes that are, if we got a quick, you know, two-minute overview of TLDR, and then we can get into it later, that'd be wonderful. Sure. Yes, Councilor Casset and Mayor, I'd be happy to do a quick overview. So, as you know, a lot of things have to go through procurement, and a lot of things take, you know, six months to a year from start to finish. So, a lot of the things that we are trying to do have to do with more upfront work. So, we are trying to get more involved with each purchase. We are trying to really promote the fact that we want to be strategic partners with each of the divisions and departments in the city, and I think the faster we can get involved, the faster we can cut straight to contract. So, there's a lot of different things that we can do to help people get what they need, whether it's using statewides or cooperatives or processing mini bids. We are trying to modify the ordinances that we have. So, as you know, we did first phase of ordinance updates, which a lot of people have really been excited about, and it's helped us cut through a lot of the red tape. But, you know, in procurement, it's hard to balance the things that we really need to be stringent on and the other side of really helping our customers, our end-user customers, agencies. So, but I'm happy to be in this position, and I'm happy for all the support you all have provided, and I'm excited to see what the internal auditor report will be as far as the process we went through recently. So, with that, I will stand for questions or just move on. Yeah, wonderful. Thank you so much, Travis. I know that you've been doing a lot of work here and are really looking at some of the best practices. So, I'll talk with you offline because I do have a lot of, you know, just kind of understanding, is six months to a year, is that a typical length for a municipality, or are we exceptionally long compared to, you know, Albuquerque, Cruces, Rio Rancho, some of the areas that we typically will compare ourselves to in the state? So, I, yeah, I look forward, and I'll reach out to you to have more of those conversations. Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions for finance? Okay, seeing none. Thank you, finance team. Let's go to move on to the last department, Community Engagement. Is the mic necessary? Good morning, Mayor Garcia, members of the governing body, Caroline Cardinos, City Clerk. I have with me Chris Peralta, Javier Martinez, Erica Quintana, Aaron Pulsifer, all from Community Engagement. Thank you for the opportunity to present to you the Community Engagement's FY27 proposed budget. I'm proud to be a part of this department, which consists of the City Clerk's Office, Constituent Services, Communications and Marketing, Mail and Duplications, Records and Archives, and the Public Defender. This budget reflects our department's commitment to transparency, customer service by connecting constituents with resources, and quality communication to the constituents of the City of Santa Fe. In this fiscal year's budget, you'll see a decrease. That's because we are not in an election season. You'll also see a request for a temporary position of the translator to a full-time position in our Constituent Services division, and the addition of a new FTE serving as a broadcast and streaming production specialist. This will relieve the ITT team from continuing this essential function of running the meetings held here in the chambers, streaming the city's top four committees, the Land Use Committees, and a few other committees. The ITT team and our department feels that this position would be better fit in Community Engagement, and this position will also be housed in our Communications and Marketing division. Our department continued to grow in services. We are proud of the work that comes out of this department. We are at the biggest capacity this department has seen. But with the growth, we are seeing more requests for service. We understand that this budget process is limited, but we hope to request capacity to fulfill the needs of the increased services. We welcome and stand for any questions. Thank you. Madam City Clerk, any questions from governing body members? Councilor Fagali. Mayor, okay, City Clerk, for with that broadcasting specialist, would that allow us to have committees that are not currently online also be streaming, or would that just be for the ones that are already streaming? I'd like to open it up. They'd have to be here in the chambers, but yeah, we could look into that definitely. I know there is a desire. Yeah, I've heard definitely from constituents that they wish there was access to more of them. The translator position, is that for print materials? Is that for live events? Is that for council meetings? What would you be covering additionally? All of the above. All of it. Thank you, Councilor. Yes, that's a great question. We hope to broaden the scope of his work to include all of that. Okay, okay. So we could have him potentially at all the council meetings or? If we don't burn him out. Those meetings are long, Councilor. They are. What? And then one, one request on my end. It would be great if we somewhere in our community engagement stuff had a calendar of what is happening on the Plaza. I know they're not all our events, but sometimes you hear people and you're like, who, who is there today? And I have no idea. So it'd be great if I could point people to one place where all of the Plaza events are listed, even if they're not city events. Absolutely. Thank you. That's it for me. Thank you, Councilor. I think Councilor Castro had her hand up, and then Councilor Casset. Thank you so much, Mayor. Thank you to the team. I did want to also express my gratitude for that full-time position, and I think it's sorely needed, and we will probably need to expand that at some point, but not this year. We have also put on an enormous amount of events. I hear over 300. Is that correct? How many events are we putting on as a City of Santa Fe? Mayor Garcia, Councilor Castro, that is my understanding. Our interim city manager is putting together a task force to address these situations. My team will be there. We do want to tackle that. We do a lot of events in our department, and we're just one department, and a small department compared to the big city we have here. Yes, and we do a tremendous job. I think that another place that we've sort of upped our game, I'm sorry to be so colloquial, is in communications. We've gotten a lot more newsletters out. We're doing a lot more communication with the public through social media. Is there anything that we want to highlight? I know I think Lawrence went to hide, but we have the new drone. Is there anything we want to highlight? I'm going to turn this over to Chris Peralta. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Councilor Castro. You know, this live streaming position probably was the biggest item because not only does it allow us to step up our game, to quote you, in streaming all meetings, committee meetings, governing body meetings, but it also allows us to bring on-location events into the fold. So our goal is to, you know, anything that's community engagement related is to make sure that the public has access to that as much as possible. So yeah, I would just say that the live streaming, and then probably later on down the road, project management. Wonderful. And I want to keep that mic, Chris. So kudos again. The website also lives in your office, and we have some usability issues. Do you want to give us any updates on how we're doing on usability of the website? Yes. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Councilor Castro. We have a website refresh planned for this year and into next year. One of the things that we're going to start doing after the new budget year is discovery with all departments, because right now we view the website as more archival, and we want to transition that to more of a service-based platform. So there's going to be a lot of vetting on what's on individual pages to make sure that stuff's just not living there for the sake of living there. That might take some funds. Will we potentially be seeing that in next year's budget or as a BAR? I think what we're going to try to do is reallocate current funds. We've received quotes with a third-party vendor, and I think within our own department, we have the skillset to kind of streamline that process so we can reduce the amount of funds needed. Wonderful. Thank you so much. I'm going to move over to Constituent Services. I'll pass the mic to Javier Martinez. Thank you so much. Thank you. Clerk, Director Martinez, enormous volume of work orders, of information. You have a great team. It is small but mighty, as we like to say in all departments in the City of Santa Fe. We're getting another person, right? We just got a new position in that department. Mayor: Good morning, honorable Mayor, members of the Council, Councilor Castro. So, right now we're a staff of three constituent services specialists and then myself as the manager. We have the project administrator, which is Jericho Simmons, and then Javier Aguilar, which is our translator. That's the whole team right now, and we're fully staffed. Okay, wonderful. So it's just the increase of the half position that is adding to your team. That is correct. Wonderful. Might we also be considering some other alternatives? AI, looking at cutting back some current contracts that we have and looking at folks in-house. How can we leverage the small but mighty team? Honorable Mayor, members of the Council, Councilor Castro. So, we are in works with IT with a phone service to include some AI to alleviate some of the, I guess, recurring phone calls that my office gets throughout the city, as well as coordinating with the Utilities Department. So that's one of the aspects that we're looking at, and I believe that it would have a little bit more detail regarding that broad coming in communication coming in. Thank you so much. And I sort of want to address that I've been asking about that from different departments. I'm actually not super excited that we're moving to AI. I think that we do a much better job as humans. So, using it in a way that is appropriate and isn't replacing jobs or isn't doing things that are going to make us feel uncomfortable that we're not getting the right response is really important to me. But sort of using it to defer calls seems like an appropriate sense, right? We still have folks answering the phones. That is correct, Councilor. Thank you so much. No further questions. Thank you. Any other questions? Oh, Councilor Casset. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, Councilor Castro, for bringing up the website. That was on my list, too. One, well, first of all, thank you. Thank you all for being here. And very excited to have you in your first budget as not interim, not acting. Really, really excited to have you leading this department. We know how much experience you bring, and I just always have appreciated your willingness to step up and take the reins, and happy they are officially and permanently yours now. So thank you so much for taking on that role. Thank you. Of course. Curious about the shopping cart management contract for $75,000. I know we've had that for a while. I'm just wondering, this doesn't feel necessary, but maybe it's because it's working that I'm not noticing them as much. So, I would like to hear how we're tracking the efficacy of this contract, how much they are collecting at this point, how it compares in years past, and how this contract essentially works in terms of reimbursement for them. Honorable Mayor, members of the governing body, Councilor Casset, that's a great question. So, as you all may know, this contract is going to end at the end of this fiscal year, June 30th. I personally called a meeting with Mayor Garcia and City Manager Brian Moya to discuss, I guess, the future of this proposal, to find out what the future move on this is. As we, the city, spent about almost a quarter of a million dollars in the last four-year contract. So we definitely want to revisit as to how better to be a fiduciary responsible organization to the constituents in regards to the massive flow of abandoned or stolen carts from the vendor, from the retailer areas. So what we did is we're extending, we got a quote to extend it for the next six months from July through December to really brainstorm in regards to a better solution on the carts. Whether we, the discussion was to possibly bring it in-house so we can control the whole aspect of the cart return system and also maybe go out to bid for another vendor for the next four years based on that. But in all actuality, I think we need to really strongly figure out what the future of this cart retrieval program is going to be in the future. As, like I say, the city spent close to a quarter of a million dollars in the last four-year contract with no responsibility to the retailer or anything. I mean, usually the retailer will just wait a week or so, and they'll get their carts back with no other responsibility other than the full burden of the city. Yeah, yeah. No, thank you. I appreciate you bringing that up because that was, it was a policy discussion that we had a while ago. There was a lot of pushback from the community around, you know, going towards the businesses, and there was some concern around it really impacting small businesses. Although what we have typically seen is the big box stores that we are seeing the carts coming from. And so I know other communities have moved to that model where they are partnering and financially partnering with the vendors or with the stores because it is a lot of money. I mean, $250,000 is, there's a lot of other things that we could do with that. So, look forward to working on that with you all and, and happy to help brainstorm and look into that because I know it's an important conversation and not always an easy one. Staying with constituent services, I saw the integration to OpenGov and the Survey 123 CRM. And that's been, you know, something I know that you and I have talked about around how do we make sure that we're giving more accurate updates to constituents. So, for example, we would close out a work order. The best, the best example I can think of is somebody asked for a light replacement, wasn't our responsibility, it was P&M's. And so then it gets closed out with this automatic email saying your work order or your problem has been fixed. And they, you know, were not happy because their problem had not been fixed. It was no longer the city's responsibility. We had done what we needed to do, which was get the information over to P&M. So, with those, with the new system, are we better able to automate these emails so that we're not sending kind of these misleading emails that make the constituents feel like they're being ignored when we close out a work order? They're not getting any other communication as to why it's been closed out at the city level, but they just know that their issue is still there. Honorable Mayor, members of the governing body, Councilor Casset, again, a great question. So right now with the integration of OpenGov with our Survey 123 system, it seems to be working very well. The goal of this OpenGov system is to have better communication and follow-through of work orders internally with our departments. So as all of you may know, Public Works is probably the biggest department that gets the, or the biggest load of work orders from our department, from streets to parks, and so on and so forth. OpenGov, when it's going to be working well, it's going to take, of course, the departments to be fully integrated into the system as they will go out there, you know, the workers in the field can take an iPad and report directly on the current status of the work order. Say, from a sidewalk, they can go out there, physically take pictures, submit if there's a notice of violation that has been submitted to the responsible party. And my staff can go onto the OpenGov platform and see all these updates live and process and give the constituent a more up-to-date update on that work order. As far as the lighting around the streets in the city, it's a challenging aspect on that since we have, we deal with P&M, who is part owner of certain light poles, and then we have Delia, who is the city's contractor to maintain and service city light poles as well. A lot of the times, my staff and myself, we reach out to either organizations. A lot of time it's, they're not part of the OpenGov system. So it's a lot of it in the antiquated system of email back and forth conversations. But, you know, hopefully, once all the departments are on board with this OpenGov system, it'll be a lot easier to get more updates as we have a liaison with the Streets Department that deals directly with P&M and Delia on the lights. As they facilitate work orders, they can give us more of a better update on this, better than the antiquated email system. Wonderful, wonderful. Good. I'm glad to hear that. So, thank you so much for your work on that and looking forward to seeing how that pans out as we get those people in the field and get the system up and running. The other part of the CRM that I've always found a little challenging that I'm curious if there will be a solution with OpenGov is I would love the ability to log in and see what I've reported to you because I send you lots of emails, and for me to be able to track them myself, and you know, if I can like log in and I know that here's a list of the things that I have sent through my, you know, that constituents have sent through me over to constituent services, so that I'm able to keep better track of them. Because then, you know, I know that can be a challenge, and I mean, you see it all the time where I'll just then send you an email asking for random updates, and it'd be wonderful if there's a way for me to look those up myself and report back to constituents. Will OpenGov give us that capacity on a back-end process? Yes, honorable Mayor, members of the governing body, Councilor Casset. So, I did a little bit of research when I first came in to this position. The subject matter expert on the back end that helps us run the Survey 123 is Mr. Leonard Padilla that works with IT. He's our GIS manager. You know, he does say that there is a database that the councilors can access, and so they'd have to log in, and they can see live and get updates on that. So, I am welcome to get any councilor that wants to have access to this, to get them into the system, help them log in, and facilitate a quick, I guess, Survey 123 CRM 101 training to give you that access. That'd be great. I had tried with when Miss Sharp was there, and so that was, you know, something that we, we attempted, and then I don't know what happened. And then I actually hadn't, hadn't brought it up since. So, let's, let's definitely give it a go. I'll, I'll reach out to you, and we can get that scheduled because I would love that access. Absolutely. And of course, to any councilor that'd like to have this training as well, just reach out to me, and we can coordinate that as well. And then my last question, there's traditionally been money, or not traditionally, the last couple years, last couple fiscal years, there's been money to update chambers within the City Clerk's budget. Is that, obviously, we have not updated chambers yet. Is that money there? Did it move somewhere else? What's going on with this project? Mayor Garcia, members of the governing body, Councilor Casset, thank you for that question. Yes, so there is intention to spend that money. Working with Jane Matthews, the project manager from facilities, I asked for an update. They have identified funding to get the architectural design service phase going. It looks like they provided a contract proposal of $355,900. And what we're waiting for is for Tim and Sam to decide on design direction, but there is movement on that and I'm happy to let that money flow through to get that done. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Thank you all again so much and thank you to your teams. Thanks, Mayor. Mayor: Thank you, Counselor. Any other questions? Okay, I'm not seeing any. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. With that, I'll hand it back off to the City Manager, Deputy City Manager for any closing processes. Oh, this is the bad this one. Okay. So at this point, we would like to this point that concludes the scheduled presentations that we had planned for the governing body. And at this time, we'd like to ask you if there's additional information that you would like and maybe turn it back to you in terms of next steps and if you would like to have additional hearings or if you feel like there's more information that you need. The next steps other than that would be bringing this resolution with adoption of the budget to the Finance Committee. It'll be held on Tuesday, the 26th, because of the Memorial Day holiday, and then we would have it on the governing body agenda for the 27th for adoption, and then we would turn it around and send it to the state. So those would be the next steps unless you want to have additional discussions in the meantime. Better turn it over to the governing body. J Counselor Cassid. Thanks, Mayor. Thank you so much, Andrea, and again, thank you to everybody for all of the work and and really, I mean, it's been a lot. It's been a bit of a wild ride. I have to be honest, I have not even had an opportunity with just how condensed everything is to have gone through all of the information. At this moment though, I would say that I actually I think that I'll be I would be fine, I believe, with the finance meeting and not necessarily needing a special hearing taking over quality of life. I don't know. I don't know how my colleagues feel. But just in terms of kind of I I feel what I feel like we could do with within this time. I I'm I'd be okay with not doing an additional meeting and and pulling everybody in. My I guess my request obviously if we were to do another one on Wednesday, you know, just to to look at staff time that if people had specific I kind of wouldn't want like an open budget hearing where we're pulling all staff after hours to another meeting on Wednesday unless there was a specific reason. And I must admit that I probably will be able to get through everything by finance. So that would be just my opinion from where I'm sitting. Obviously, you know, anybody else obviously may have very different opinions. My other request though would really be, and I've said this before, I'd like to have a, as I'm saying, a post-mortem on this process. I I'm glad we got through this in the last, you know, day and a half. It's impressive we got through this gauntlet. There are some yesterday my brain was completely fried, so that was too long of a day in my opinion. Some in the future like having maybe just a few more days but some shorter chunks. But also I really want to talk about how we incorporate what we traditionally did with budget hearings which was really getting this incredible deep dive into departments and like having a chance to talk to them and and get like it was always just such an educational experience that we did a bit of as well. So that's something that again I don't I don't see that happening on a Wednesday night or on, you know, the quality of life night. So that's my thought is I I would personally be fine with just govern or finance and then governing body in terms of how this process has been set up. But after we get everything in, I would just love for us to all have a conversation around what went well. I think there were some things that we that we did really well here and I think we kind of overshot it a little bit on trying to condense it this much. This felt a little bit condensed, but again, if we are potentially incorporating these these department updates and these like really wonderful opportunities for deep dives throughout the year, then perhaps I wouldn't feel that I, you know, missed that part so much. So anyway, those are my thoughts in terms of next steps. Thank you. You, Counselor, any other I'll just go down the line. Counselor Bamante, Counselor Castro, then Thank you, Mayor. Yeah, I I would just want to echo that staff did an amazing job on this. This was my first budget process and I thought it went pretty smoothly and the the staff and the the City Manager's office was great about getting us really a lot of extra information. Whenever we asked for it, there it was. And so like Counselor Cassid, I actually haven't had a time to go through quite all of it because it was so much information. But I really appreciated the format. I thought it moved along quickly and like like Counselor Cassid, I I personally don't see the need for additional outside meetings other than perhaps bringing it up in finance next. So that that would be my vote. So thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Yes. Thank you to staff. Thank you to everyone. I agree. I think we might be looking at a little bit longer of a finance meeting than we normally have, but that's the place to do some of this work. I agree that it would have been, at least for me, better to get some of the materials early on so that we could have reviewed it along with the packet so we could have asked some of the questions in finer detail. To Counselor Cassid's point, we have used these as more informational sessions and I think that there might be a different format. So it we're talking about a lot of big changes and some of my hesitation on not having subcommittee meetings or standing committee meetings is that we get some of this information in presentation form from those departments in those meetings. And so if we are able to potentially build out a schedule further in the future so that other counselors can attend those if they are interested, maybe we wouldn't need to get so much information in these finance meetings. But that is yet to be seen. Those are my comments. Thank you. Yes. Okay. Again, thank you staff and City Manager and the Mayor. You guys did work very hard to get us what we asked for. I know we came at you guys heavy loaded with a ton of requests. And I'd like to thank the fellow counselors. I think we did a good job getting through this process. It was different than we've done in the past for those of us who have been on the council. Also, there will be a post-mortem meeting at the Finance Committee on June 8th. So, anyone who's interested in attending that, as always, I will allow everyone to speak and have a participate in the dialogue. Just continue on down the line. Counselor Garcia. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, City Manager, Deputy City Manager, everyone who had a hand in all of this. I I do appreciate the the consolidation of all of this. I I know that at times we could start discussing so many different topics and it's not that they're not important, but how relevant is is it to each and everybody's budget. I like to focus on the money that's being provided to each department and how well they're being utilized. Because efficiency is really what makes the whole city organization work. I do appreciate the the different departments and I think the reason why it was able to be consolidated is because it the departments were reimagined and thank you, Mr. Mayor, for for that and I think that giving the autonomy to each department to to come forward. I do apologize, I was not able to be here for the majority of yesterday's hearings, but the the ones that I just were here to to to listen to, I think it has given each department the ability to really kind of manage their department and I think that's what these budget are supposed to do, give the power to the department heads and let them do their job. I don't feel that there is a need for for for another space for another meeting unless we have we can come up with a consensus of what the purpose of that meeting is. And you know, in regards to to collaborating with with my colleagues, this is the time to maybe make a recommendation of what your thoughts are. Because it is an opportunity for each individual counselor to bring forth, let's just say an amendment. And so, you know, we want to kind of maybe wrap our heads around that before we get into a final governing body meeting where we're there for five hours trying to discuss an amendment at the last minute. But just my recommendation for for efficiencies and to have an open dialogue and since we're all here, this is the time to do it. Those are my comments. I do appreciate all of the information being brought forth. You can't bring forth every single piece of information and I do like the fact that we were provided the line items for each department which is actually very helpful because I I'm not a firm believer in micromanaging and yet we still have to have that information. So I do appreciate all of that. Thank you, City Manager. Thank you, Deputy City Manager and thank you, Mr. Mayor. Mr. Chavis. Thank you. Sorry, I've been in and out. I do want to thank everyone for their work. It was clear that you worked day and night trying to get people information. I do think that this is a preview of systematic changes that we're making that are only going to get better. I think overall like with how this went rather than being over weeks of a process, I think how our governing body meetings are going like we're showing that we could be more efficient as we continue to collaborate and have a more direct connection and kind of work environment with staff and I think that's been very clear is occurring these last what are we in May, five months. And I think we could continue to build better. I really feel like making budget and progress through it a constant conversation in work sessions and in committee meetings like very intentional conversations around spending money movement but like relating back to the big picture we have here will help guide us every time we come to budget time and I think that would be helpful because it's creating a story of how our money is moving, how it's evolving, how it's being spent, how it's not being spent. And I think it will eliminate some of the questions and lack of understanding when we get to this place. And whether like I said, those are check-ins or presentations. I would say appropriate for like our work sessions. So there could be deep dives into that. And just kind of avenues set in getting more information if necessary. But I just like applaud administration. I applaud our city team because I don't know how clear it is to the public. But it is very clear on our end that we are as a city becoming more efficient in our process in making decisions and just moving things through and making sure that everyone is feeling supported. And it falls a lot on our our staff though. So I want to say that because I know that we feel like it's efficiency. They're probably working day and night. So that's another reason why I think it's just continued systematic progress and improvement which we're like on track for. So, thank you all for everything you do, and I look forward to just continuing to build better and being part of that through all of your work and guidance. So, thank you. Councilor: Thank you. I have a practical question, which is, how would we put forth amendments? How does that work? Would we have to take it to Finance? I'm not even on Finance. So, how does that work? Of information. Thank you, members of the governing body. Councilor Faggali, we've been discussing the most efficient way to address the amendments with Marcy because, at least in the past, it's been a bit of a burden on her office to get them done. So, what we're recommending, what we're requesting nicely, is that any amendments that are proposed be submitted in writing prior to the Finance Committee meeting. The meeting on the 26th. Yes. And because it does need to be finalized for adoption on the 27th, it doesn't give a lot of room there, but hopefully, next week, working with staff, we can get those in shape for consideration of Finance. And just so I'm clear, they are an amendment to this book that we have. Is that what we're amending? Yes, it would be an amendment. The resolution basically had an attachment, and so the amendment would specify what is being changed in that attachment. Okay. Well, thanks, Council. I would like to add, can I add one thing to that? We would prefer it not be Tuesday because of that. We'd prefer, you guys can do whatever you would like, but we would prefer it to be about noon on the 21st. That would give Marcy a day and a half during the week because it is a three-day weekend. So, we're trying to give Marcy a little more time. So, it would give us a day and a half during work hours because if we got it, it's a three-day weekend. So, I'm just asking very nicely. I know Marcus is, but it would be a lot on Marcy and the team, especially Budget, on Friday to try to work on this. So, we prefer something noon on Thursday at the latest, or Thursday, and then trying to get this done all day Friday. We would work our due diligence to get it done because we know we're going into a three-day weekend. So, I'm sorry to be, I'm just trying to give realistic timelines to Marcy and to Budget to try to get this done by that timeline if this is possible. That would give us some time to work on it. That's very, yeah, that's great. Thanks. Any other comments or questions? Yep, Council Garcia. I may make a suggestion if there is a plan for that. Being that the next opportunity to hear what that intention of that amendment is at Finance, being that anybody who would bring that proposal would come to Finance, so it can be, we can have a discussion over it because the final vote would end up being at Governing Body. And that way, it may not be something that's moved at Finance but would be at least discussed so we kind of have a discussion over it before it comes to the Governing Body meeting. That's just my suggestion. Thank you. Councilor Foster. I think that's something we talked about with staff is that we would have the Finance Committee on the 26th as overflow for amendments or any other discussion that people want to have. And so that we've worked on, I call it clearing the deck. We've worked on putting an agenda together that's kind of light, no presentations, stuff that we think is likely to pass without a lot of dialogue so that we can focus on the budget that day. Councilor Casset. Thank you, Mayor. To Councilor Garcia's point, yes, I think that it's definitely needed that any amendments be discussed at Finance. However, knowing that that's not on everybody's schedule, if you are somebody who does not sit on the Finance Committee and you have an amendment that you want to have discussed and you can't be there, I am more than happy to meet and present said amendment. I'm happy to move it for Finance Committee to vote on it, regardless of my opinions on it. So, if that is something that anybody needs assistance with, I always like to try to offer that when we're dealing with amendment processes and it's hitting a committee that I'm at and somebody else may not be. So, if that might be you, please, please, please feel free to reach out. Thank you. I would offer the same as Chair. Thank you for those offers. Any other conversation questions? Well, thank you all for going through this process. It's new. It probably most likely will shift next year based off feedback recommendations. Because again, what we're trying to build is an efficient process where the jet work gets done, where it's ultimately not a weeks-long intensive process. Mr. Mayor, can I add one thing? You got it. Councilors, also on Tuesday night, if you would like any directors to be there, would you let me know at least by 3:00? So, I don't, if it's okay, I didn't want to drag the whole team here again on Tuesday night, but I would appreciate it if that's okay by the Mayor to just let me know even 30 minutes before they leave at 5:00. I will drag them all down here to Finance on Tuesday, but I don't want them all sitting here another night if they are not needed by you guys. I would like them to be with their families. Okay. Yeah. Again, open to all suggestions, and we've got time next week to, whether it's additional questions to be asked, if we need folks showing up, whether it's on Tuesday or Wednesday, or the Governing Body meeting, we want to make sure that we're creating a very much inclusive process. And so with that, we will stand adjourned. Bye.