Regular Finance Committee Meeting - Last Monday Mon, Sep 28, 2026 · Finance Committee https://santafeminutes.space/meeting/956-finance-sep-28-2026 == Executive Summary == The Finance Committee met on 09/28/2026 to discuss an internal audit of the city's procurement process, conducted by Baker Tilly. The audit identified significant inefficiencies, including a lack of formalized departmental processes, a high rate of errors in contracts, decentralized negotiations, and fragmented use of multiple technology systems. A key finding was the City Manager's absence from the review process for contracts requiring governing body approval, which was flagged as a risk. The committee explored recommendations to centralize some procurement functions, refresh the procurement manual, and address staffing shortages in the procurement office. There was also a significant discussion about the city's adherence to the state procurement code versus developing its own home rule policies for greater efficiency. Concerns were raised about the cumbersome contract approval process and the potential for increasing the small purchase threshold to $100,000. The committee also delved into the city's use of OpenGov and Tyler Munis systems, questioning the redundancy and cost of maintaining both, and the potential for technology to streamline workflows. A motion related to the procurement process evaluation and recommendations passed unanimously. == Key Decisions == - Approved the agenda. - Approved the consent calendar. - Approved the presented item related to the procurement process evaluation and recommendations. == Motions & Votes == - Motion to approve the presented item (likely related to the procurement process evaluation and recommendations) — Passed unanimously (Councilor Castro, Councilor Cassette, Councilor Garcia, and Councilor Bustamante voted yes). == Public Comment == Councilor Castro expressed concern that process redundancies have been discussed before and questioned what makes this current effort different and more actionable. Deputy City Manager Phillips noted that some recommendations, like increased staffing, align with existing needs identified by the Chief Procurement Officer, providing justification for changes. Mr. Gonda, the contractor, highlighted the unusual absence of the City Manager in the contract workflow and the excessive committee review layers compared to other municipalities. Councilor Cassette questioned the extent to which the city is bound by state procurement requirements versus what can be changed under home rule authority to improve efficiency. Travis (staff) indicated the city adopted the state's procurement code due to a past report (Macard, around 2018) but believes the city has the ability to fully depart from state statute and establish its own home rule policies. == Topics == - Procurement Process Review - Contract Approval Workflow - Technology Systems (OpenGov/Munis) - Staffing and Workload Analysis - State Procurement Code - McHarg Report Impact - Training and Communication - Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) - New Controller Onboarding == Full Transcript == We are live. Thank you. Looks like we have everyone here. Chair Faulkner is out of town, so I'll be chairing the meeting for this evening. I'd like to call to order the Finance Committee meeting for, where are we? September 28, 2026. Can I get a roll call, please? Certainly. Councilor Cassette? Here. Councilor Castro? Vicente. Councilor Garcia? Yes. Councilor Bustamante? Here. And Chair Faulkner is excused this evening. Chair, you have a quorum. Thank you so much. I'd like to get an approval of the agenda. Are there any changes from staff? No changes from staff this evening. To approve. Motion and a second. All in favor? Any opposed? Motion passes. Onto approval of the consent calendar. Are there any items removed from consent? There were no items pulled for discussion this evening. Motion on the consent. Moved over. Second. We have a motion and a second. All in favor? We don't have a roll call on that one, right? No, Chair. All in favor? Any opposed? Motion passes. Nothing pulled off consent. Actually, public comment. Is there anyone from the public here to speak from the podium? None in the room and none online this evening. Great. Thank you so much, Erminia. On to presentations. There are none, and we'll end up, what is our next item? Action item, I believe. Our next action item this evening is the review of Fiscal Year 2026 Internal Audit Project: Procurement Process. And we have Andrea Phillips, our Deputy City Manager, as well as Pete Gonda for Baker Tilly online this evening. Oh, and Travis Dunlita, our Procurement Officer. Thank you so much. Welcome to the Finance Committee. Hi. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me this evening. If we can go ahead and promote Pete Gonda with Baker Tilly. He should be joining us remotely. He and Haley Garcia are with our internal audit consulting firm. Baker Tilly, which used to be Moss Adams, is our consulting internal audit firm. They perform internal audit projects on our behalf. You saw us, I think, a month ago for the recruitment process audit. And tonight, we have the procurement process review. Pete has been working with us for the last several months on trying to complete this report that's in your packet. I do want to just give a shout out to Travis Dunlita and the rest of the team in the Procurement Office. They were phenomenal in providing information about what our current process is. We also had a lot of great participation from our contracts administrator and the City Attorney's Office, as well as folks all throughout the city who participated in the interviews. And we just really appreciate folks being, you know, providing their input and helping to make this process that touches so much of what we do even more streamlined and a better process. So with that, I'll go ahead and turn it over to you, Pete. Hopefully, you can hear us. I can hear you just fine. Thank you, Andrea. Hi, everyone. I'm Pete Gonda, Senior Manager here with Baker Tilly. I've been with the firm, gosh, it's been nine years now, following a career in local government. I'm a subject matter specialist in procurement in the firm, and I just love doing these types of reviews. I can echo Andrea's sentiments. The City team was awesome to work with. It's what we hope for in these types of engagements. This review, of course, follows a review that was conducted in 2025. This is a little more of a detailed review, and it had some interesting parts to it that I'll, that I'll walk you through. Let me share my screen, and we're just going to cover the executive summary. Can everybody see that? Okay. So these, this is from our executive summary in the report. And, of course, it, it shows our observations and recommendations for improvement. I will say that two-thirds of our recommendations in this report review stemmed from the process mapping that we did. And that's very interesting. It doesn't, it doesn't usually work like that, but we, we did process mapping and based on what we heard during the interview process with stakeholders that there were issues with contract and getting into contracts, you know, general issues with how long it takes to cycle through procurement. So what we landed on was an RFP process for services greater than $200,000 that would require governing body approval. And we broke that down into some sub-phases here, and this is kind of how the, the first 10 of these recommendations really flow from the process mapping session, sessions that we conducted. So in, in procurement, the procurement world, you'll have a pre-solicitation phase, solicitation phase, evaluation phase, contract negotiation and approval phase, on to contract execution, et cetera. And the first few recommendations here are about the pre-solicitation phase. What we found was that there weren't formalized processes in place at the department level to really review specifications, go through like a quality control and assurance check of the specs or scope of work. So consequently, what was happening was solicitations were going out and downstream when the contracts were being drafted, there was, folks were finding issues with the contracts, statement of work, scope of work, specifications, et cetera, among other things, but that was a big, a big part of it. So the first set of recommendations really talk about leveraging a robust procurement planning or pre, pre-solicitation phase. And along with that, there's some, some things that, that we felt could be transitioned to procurement. I didn't, I didn't mention at the top, but this was one of the elements of our scope was to look at Santa Fe procurement from the centralized to decentralized continuum. Most cities fall somewhere in the middle, not truly centralized, not truly decentralized, and Santa Fe sort of fits that, that middle-of-the-road model. But we felt that there are some responsibilities currently being decentralized to departments that the city may wish to bring back into the procurement fold. Procurement subject matter folks are, are better positioned to handle things like that. And that's kind of goes along with observation and recommendation three here about making some determinations about services and, and sourcing methods, et cetera. Similar, four follows a similar vein. It's, you know, about conducting pre-proposal conferences and, and leveraging procurement central expertise in, in getting through a clean evaluation program. The next compendium of recommendations really isolate on the contracting process. What, what we learned during our engagement that about 90% of contracts that come through legal have some sort of error, error with them with the draft, whether it's compensation related or scope of work related. And that's, it's a very high rate and it tends to bog down the process. And part of that has to do with how and when negotiations are being done and that it's the central to user departments are doing the negotiating over a sort of a sequential workflow, and we've made some recommendations around that about how to sort of redo the workflow and bring some of these tasks back into the purchasing fold. And you can see that reflected in the appendices on the future state process maps. So really this, the whole act of putting, negotiating and putting together a contract and getting it through levels of approval. We think the city could benefit from a more centralized approach to that. And that would include the purchasing memo process. One of the things that we learned that was frankly very surprising to us is that the City Manager is not included in the review process for contracts that require governing body approval. It's kind of limits administrative oversight. We see it as a, a potential element of, of risk. And, and, you know, I've been doing these reviews for over nine years now in, I think I'm up to 14 or 15 states, and I've done dozens of these reviews, and this is the first time I've encountered a workflow for contract approval that required governing body approval to not go through the City Manager's Office. So that was very interesting to us. And along with that, there's some, what, what we feel are confusing parts of the code that don't adequately distinguish between contract approval, contract award and approval, who's the awarding body, and, and who executes that contract. So we made some recommendations around that. And that would follow a delegated workflow. We would recommend that the City Manager execute contracts on behalf of the city that are greater than 200,000, and that authority would be delegated by the governing body. And then the City Manager could then delegate downward in the organization to the Chief Procurement Officer or potentially other designees to be able to execute contracts up to the $200,000. So the, the balance of these recommendations are really about this, next tranche here really talks about level of centralization. Purchasing really isn't staffed or structured right now to take on additional responsibilities. If, if you recall from the 2025 report, pure, pure agency review was done at that time and, and concluded that purchasing would need at least one position, and that was then. And, and if purchasing were to assume additional responsibilities now, at minimum, that one person would be needed. But really there's, one of the things we recommended that hasn't been done yet is a comprehensive workload analysis. So that really needs to be done. In addition to adding this interim support, we think a longer-term model, especially if the city looks towards greater centralization over time, you'd really have to do that to make sure purchasing was adequately staffed and structured. We can see that maybe a more formalized approach to department and user responsibilities could benefit the city, maybe under a purchasing liaison program. That's something that, that you, you may see in our reports from time to time. One of the things that we were asked to look at was whether the city should continue to follow or depart from the state procurement code as a home rule city. Santa Fe has the authority to adopt its own procurement policies as long as they don't conflict with state law, but chose in 2018 to follow the state procurement code. And since that time has looked for ways to depart from, from some of the structure of the state code to build in more efficiency and flexibility. So we would recommend that, that, that be done on more of a case-by-case basis while the workload analysis is being done, while responsibilities are, are shifting. And the, the balance of the recommendations really are, are more about training, communication, having consistency in communications, and, and a role-based procurement training program, something that's a little more robust than what's in place now. That's not to say that purchasing is not doing training. They're absolutely doing training, and they're, they've added some training efforts to the fold, but a little more structure around this could, could pay some dividends, we feel. One of the things that really jumped out at us was the number of technology systems that are, when we did the process mapping, we learned that there was at least seven forms of technology that were being used in sort of a fragmented fashion to get from procurement planning through contract execution. So we've made some recommendations about how the city might want to evaluate, evaluating a more cohesive technology strategy over time. And the last, last but not least, couple of recommendations, one around KPIs. This was something that came up in 2025 that we feel should, should be done now, and this would have applicability elsewhere in the city. Strong KPIs, you know, the old adage, what gets measured gets done. We think that, that, that, that would be a great benefit to purchasing to have some KPIs in place. And then lastly, the procurement manual really needs a bit of a refresh. It hasn't been updated in a while, since 2020, and things have changed since then. Policies and procedures have changed, and we made some recommendations or some examples of where we think the manual could be refreshed for greater effect. So that, in a nutshell, is a quick summary of our observations and recommendations. We'd be more than happy to address any questions you may have. Thank you, Mr. Gonda. Yes, sir. Appreciate that overview and presentation. Anything else from Deputy City Manager Andrea K. Phillips? Maybe if I could just give a little bit of background too. So this did go to the Internal Audit Committee. We presented this to them at their special meeting on September 15. The next stop in the process is bringing it here so that you can see what the findings and recommendations were, observations rather than findings, sorry. And then we would take it to the Governing Body. It is on the consent agenda unless the Governing Body wants to pull it off and get the presentation as well on Wednesday night. But after it goes through these different steps, we spend time then digesting all of the recommendations and then providing a management response where we can get into those details about whether we agree or disagree about the recommendation and then what it might take to implement that recommendation. Right? So some of these things, for instance, the staffing piece, that's going to require some time to build up to that. The technology piece with the seven different platforms, we're having conversations about that right now. So this could be something that could take a couple of years even to fully implement. But our management response letter and then our implementation tracking will keep us on task in terms of trying to move forward on these recommendations within the resources that we have available. Thank you so much. Turn it over to the committee. Any questions? Councilor Castro. Thank you so much, Chair, and thank you, Deputy City Manager, and also to our contractor for all the hard work. Obviously, these recommendations are very high-level and are going to take a while to implement. One of my concerns is that this is not the first time we've been discussing process and the need to sort of look deeply at the redundancy. I hate to say this, but what's different about this process? What actionable steps do we have this time around? That's a great question. And I do, I don't want to speak for our Chief Procurement Officer, but some of the things that are being recommended in here are things that, frankly, he has brought forward. "Hey, we need more staff." And so I think this does provide a good justification, if you will, for why we might want to consider adding more positions within procurement, for example, especially if we are going to move towards a more centralized model. So we have decentralized procurement quite a bit. We've done that with our recruitment process, with a lot of our HR processes throughout the city. And I do think, in talking with Monica Maestas and other folks, it may be time for us to kind of take some of those procedures and processes back and have those subject matter experts who are procurement officials or trained in best practices in procurement lead some of those instead of having the departments tackle all those different processes. There are some things, obviously, that we need the departments to weigh in on, but we are seeing a lot of time and effort and maybe information getting lost in translation between those handoffs between the departments and procurement. So I think that if we were to look at a more centralized model, I think it would require probably some staffing, as well as some tough conversations potentially with the departments. Some departments are probably better equipped than others to handle the procurement piece, and they might want to hold on to that. Some might say, "No, that would be great. Please help us." Right? So I think now that we have these recommendations, I would like to spend time with the directors and really kind of sift through what this might look like because we do have folks within the departments, especially the larger departments that have business operations managers and admin managers who are tackling some of these pieces of the work. I don't want to get out ahead of folks and say, "Hey, we're going to change this around without their buy-in." Right? Because we are talking about people's duties and their scopes of work. Agreed. And I just, I'm going to note that I heard a little bit about boards and commissions, and we might have some of those same sticking points around that authority. And I don't know if you want to go into it a little bit more. It was just a fleeting comment, but is there something that we need to dive into there about who's actually, because we talked about City Manager as well, who's actually executing these contracts? Is it the Governing Body? If I may, I think that is something that there are differing opinions throughout the city about who should have that authority. I do find it a little odd that the City Manager's office is not in the approval queue if it's over $200,000. We get the Chief Procurement Official to sign off, our Finance Director and our Budget Officer, and then our attorney in terms of, like, form of contract, but the City Manager doesn't approve any of that. And so we don't really know. Sometimes I find out what's going to be on the agenda in the committee reviews. Right? And so I do think there's maybe an opportunity there for us to look at that process. I think the other thing too that's interesting is that we could, and this would require an ordinance change, we could delegate. We could ask the Governing Body to delegate additional authority for contracts. We could increase the bar limit. We could do different things to help with some of this administrative process and perhaps cut down on some of the time limit or the timing of it going through these different committees. Agreed. And so I would just offer Mr. Gonda an opportunity to weigh in if he wants to, but no further questions for me. Thank you so much, Deputy City Manager. Thank you, Chair. I appreciate that. I, yeah, I just, I really should have touched on this. I'm glad you brought this up. But so this is, the purchasing memo review and approval process itself, we found to be a little confusing and cumbersome. When I mentioned that I've done a lot of these reviews and this is my first encounter with the City Manager not being in the workflow, it was very surprising to us. But this city also requires multiple committee review layers on these staff reports. We know that you're talking about maybe simplifying that, but we totally agree. It's not something that we, I mean, we do encounter it, but it's more of the exception and not the rule. And the fact that you have two or maybe even three committees that review contracts before they're approved by the Governing Body, with the fact that Governing Body members are on the committees themselves, it's a little odd to us. Understood. Thank you so much. No further questions. Thank you. Any other questions? Councilor Cassette. Thank you, Chair. I appreciate you bringing up the conversation around committees. We've been starting to really look at some of these processes and how it slows down actually getting things done. And committee things having to hit committee is a, that's a, that's a big one. And I had no idea that actually the City Manager didn't see things over $200,000. I just knew that they, you know, they had signing authority up to that, but that they were cut out of the process. Otherwise, is good to know and seems like a bit of an oversight. I am curious, and this is something I've always struggled with, is what is required by the state? What have we adopted that the state does that we have learned is not maybe the best way for us to be doing this work considering that we are a municipality, not a state? And then, what has been working? I know that there was some argument when we moved over, I think I had just gotten on when we last passed the last procurement manual. So I hadn't, you know, very little understanding of what was going on at that moment in time. But this has been a big conversation that we'll all hear from people like, "Oh, well, we can't do it because of state requirement." "Oh, well, we can't do it because of our procurement code." And whether or not following the state was required in this area. So I'm sure you can't go through all of it, but I would love to hear some examples of ways that we can deviate from the state process that we are allowed to that is going to make this a more efficient process. Yep. Well, go ahead, Andrea. Okay. Yeah. I was just going to refer to, I think this is item number 14, Home Rule Procurement Authority. And if you're following in the report, it's on page 42. So we did ask Pete to just take a look at the state procurement code and to see, are we maximizing, you know, as a home rule municipality, is this the best thing for us to do? Right? So we can create certain deviations or exceptions, which we have done, and those are kind of listed out here. We've done things like, you know, adding processes for emergency procurements, adopting the construction manager at risk or CMAR project delivery. So there have been some things that we have done that have provided either augmentation or exception from that. But I think we might want to consider just holistically whether we want to deviate entirely. And I don't know the answer to that off the top of my head, but I do think that it does beg the question of whether we want to even follow the state procurement code at all, or do we want to create our own and provide more leeway within that? So that wasn't the full scope of this project. It was kind of touched on within that observation, but I think they're recommending that maybe that's another potential side project that we could look into. And I think we would probably need to engage potentially the attorney's office in that. Yeah. That's what I was going to ask. Do we have, I mean, do we even have the authority to fully scrap the thing and rebuild, which sounds like a very, very large, cumbersome process as opposed to kind of looking at it and saying, "This is working well for us. This is fine. This is not the best." And I, I don't know the answer to that off the top of my head. It feels like if we have home rule authority, we should use it and make things easier on ourselves. And I don't, I just off the cuff, I don't know that the state, I mean, maybe they're the most efficient procurement method and methodology out there, but I think it's, we adopted it probably in absence of having something. And we do have folks who work for us who came from the state, so they are very familiar with those procedures. But I know there are other cities that have adopted their own procurement methodology. But I don't know off the top of my head exactly what that would look like. Looks like we have Travis, wants to chime in on this. Hello. Yes. Can you hear me? Yes. All right. Thank you, Chair, Counselors. I believe we implemented the state's procurement code because of the Macard report back. I don't know when it was, 2018 or before. But I believe we do have the ability to depart from statute fully and establish our own home rule policies. However, I, I think what we're doing now, I guess, in my opinion, for what it's worth. I think what we're doing now is working when we find areas that need to be improved. We've processed bills through the governing body and made things a little easier, or I guess more, I should say, maybe more appropriate for the city's needs. For example, we increased the small purchase threshold to $100,000 from $60,000. That's kind of sped things up quite a bit. And there's some other areas that we've modified, but I guess the undertaking of completely scrapping what we have and developing something new, I'm not against it. I just can't currently imagine how hard that would be. Yeah, that does sound like quite the task. So, yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. I actually think bringing up the McHarg report is helpful because I can't tell you how many things I have said, "Why are we doing this terrible, cumbersome process?" And it was because we did not have a cumbersome process and potentially had some big challenges financially in terms of making sure that everything was going according to plan and there weren't ethical challenges. So, it's something for us to keep in mind. We come up against this a lot. I think, Rene, I think we were, were we talking about signing authority, or was that me and Pilar? I don't remember. We were talking about how three people have to sign off on this thing. And it was like, "Well, I'm because of the McHarg report when only one person had to sign off, and they were also the person that got to choose this." And so, something for us to really think about is looking back at the McHarg report when we are looking at changing procurement to see, "Hey, what went wrong there?" And maybe there is a good reason this is in place. We could still probably streamline in specific areas. I am not an expert in this area, so, Travis, your opinion does matter a lot. Quite weighed quite heavily. But just something I think we should be cautious of, and thank you, Travis, for bringing it up because it had slipped my mind as well. So thank you, sir. Thank you, Councilor Bustamante. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Mr. Gonda. Thank you, Deputy City Manager. So, looking through the technology section, it looks like at least potentially some of these things could be solved by looking at the workflow process without having to make a bigger investment. But what keeps coming to mind here, not just with this, but with other issues that we've had is, I keep seeing OpenGov and I keep seeing Munis. And, depending on who you ask, it's kind of like this holy war. Well, both of them can do all the things, right? But neither one is doing half the things is what it seems like. And so, I mean, are we looking at potentially phasing one out or at least using more capabilities of one over the other? Yeah, thank you, Councilor Bustamante and members of the committee. You're definitely hitting on, I mean, I think we're at a crucial point here at the city where we need to really evaluate these large enterprise-wide systems. So OpenGov is a competitor to Tyler Munis, and Munis is our ERP and our source of truth. That's our financial data. That's where it all kind of comes back to. But we have been rolling out different modules within others, within other software platforms, including OpenGov. So, Travis can speak more about it, but we actually do have an OpenGov contracting different systems even for procurement alone. And maybe, Travis, you can opine on where you think we're headed with that, but I think there is a lot, there's a lot of capabilities within the OpenGov procurement and procurement and contracting platform that have allowed us to reach more vendors. So, it sends out kind of notices, if you sign up as a vendor, you get all these different commodities, and you can get notices of any kind of request for proposals or bids. And so it reaches a lot more vendors. I think the interface is also appreciated by staff, maybe a little bit more so in the workflow and routing for contract approval. And then, Travis, I don't know if you have any other thoughts on, like, from the procurement side for technology. But I think there's a lot of good conversations happening there too. But sorry, go ahead, Travis. No worries. Thank you, Chair, committee members. We have been in talks about updating our processes since we implemented OpenGov. There are many different workflows and sections within OpenGov that we have access to. For instance, we're working with legal to streamline the review process. So there's a drafting and review process built into the contract module. So you can get from start to finish. It even has a signature function. So we could essentially eliminate a number of licenses for Adobe Sign. And we just had a meeting about that today. We've had lots of meetings to gather information. It just, it seems in these various areas that there are certain people married to their systems, and modifying things would be a big undertaking. Although, I'm not opposed to it, and my staff are kind of chomping at the bit to make things easier. We have access in purchasing to develop workflows, templates, different types of projects. So we've actually tested a lot of different things. We met with IT, and we actually drafted the workflow to, from start to finish, the number of steps it takes to establish a contract through both processes, City Manager and Governing Body. And there were far too many steps and far too many systems. So it is my desire to use OpenGov for that. As far as Munis is concerned, I think, I think it's, I like it. It is a little bit hard to get used to, but it has a lot of quirks, but it does work well at its core. But, yeah, we do, we do hope to streamline soon. Okay, thank you. Yeah, because you both bring up kind of two, for me, having worked with software licensing and stuff, two big issues, the enterprise-level applications and software licensing. And, enterprise-level applications are very expensive to make, you know, to pay subscriptions for. And then licensing is generally per seat, so it's per you or per user. And so we're spending, I imagine, quite a bit of money on these two systems that can kind of both do the same thing. So I'd be curious to just hear in the future where we're headed with this and, you know, so that because dropping one or even, you know, some of these other things, dropping even just dropping what he talked about, dropping licenses for something as big as Adobe, because that function can be, you know, managed elsewhere would be a significant cost savings. So thank you, sir. Thank you, Councilor. Did somebody want to respond to that? Or I, I can if Andrea is okay. Sure, please go ahead. Okay, Chair, committee members, we don't have the OpenGov core. So we don't have their financial management. We don't have their ERP. We have other modules. So it's kind of like plug and play with all their other modules similar to Tyler Munis modules. We currently only have one ERP. I know it's kind of been thrown up, thrown around that we have multiple, but we have one ERP and multiple OpenGov modules that function differently. They, they support specific areas of the city. Thank you. Thank you for that clarification, Mr. Dutton. Any other questions from committee members? I just have a few myself and maybe some comments, but I do appreciate the evaluation of our processes. I mean, you always have to look at what you're doing, see if it's working. If it's not working, when do you pivot? I think that the City Manager issue as far as not signing, in my opinion, was designed to give the governing body full control over the $200,000, which now puts it in this process, this kind of this long drawn-out process of going through the committee, getting passed, getting approved, going to governing body. And so, I think it's just a different avenue that it takes. Having the City Manager's, maybe not approval for it, but recommendation would help. You know, he's kind of the person that's overseeing everything, and yet, Andrea can probably speak to the fact of how many things come across your desk, which, I mean, I guess it is what it is, but it puts the City Manager in a, in a spot where they have to really be on top of all of the above there. Streamlining the review process, and I think, you know, when you have 10 steps to get to a final outcome, you always have to take a look at how do you reduce that to five steps because the extra five steps obviously take a lot of time and effort, which, you know, the bureaucratic process is what it is. And so, that goes back to, you know, having checks and balances. So if you have an automated process with some triggers that would say, "Okay, if it's, you know, this happens, then it does have to go there. If that happens, then it does have to go there." And so understanding that that review, and I think that's what this is kind of what we're looking at. And then, you know, going back to more staff, you know, I, I'm not opposed to more staff, but how do you qualify the position and the productivity and how, you know, is it, I always ask this question, especially in my own private business, "Is it more staff, or is it just different type of management?" And how do we get to get those steps and work more efficiently? Now I am a technology manager in my own right, and I do feel that through technology, you can make life a lot easier. But it still is only as good as the person behind the scenes making sure that it's all working. And so, I don't really, like I say, have any specific questions. I do appreciate the, the, the committee for asking what they have asked. And so, I mean, it's, it's all there. I, I guess it really comes down to, you know, what, what was presented in, in the, in the evaluation and what the recommendations are, seeing how we're doing that and how, how we, what, what are the, the type of things that we can change quickly to make things more efficient, and that's the bottom line. So with that, I'll, I don't have any other questions. I do thank you all for, for the presentation and, who was brought forth here. I believe this is an action item, so we have to make a motion to move this on to governing body. Move to approve. Second. Motion on the floor and a second. And can you call the roll, please? Certainly. Councilor Castro? Yes. Councilor Cassette? Yes. Councilor Garcia? Yes. Councilor Bustamante? Yes. And that motion passes. Alright. Thank you so much, and I do appreciate the thoughtful presentation and working on trying to make our lives a little easier. Right? It's in and day out. That will take us on to matters from staff. Do we have any matters from staff? Good evening, Mr. Chair, Councilors. I just want to let you know that we have a new controller that onboarded last week. Her name is Patricia Paulino. Super excited to have a new controller. She comes with a great bit of experience. Also, I sent an email out last Tuesday to all councilors. We're in the deep in our audit right now, and there's a fraud and risk inquiry. I hope you filled out and sent back to us. Okay, that's all I have. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ms. Maestas. And do we have any matters from the committee? No matters from the committee. Moving on. Matters from the Chair. She's not here. I don't have any on her behalf. And it looks like we'll be getting on to that kickoff for the Eagles versus the Bears. So next meeting will be Tuesday, October 13, 2026, and we'll be adjourned.