This special meeting of the Annapolis Finance Committee, held on May 4, 2026, from 9:34 a.m. to 12:21 p.m., focused on budget presentations for the Office of Community Services (OCS) and the Department of Transportation (DOT) for Fiscal Year 2027. The committee reviewed performance metrics, discussed program priorities, and requested follow-up data on several items.
34 a.m. on May 4th, 2026. Good morning, everybody. Uh at this time I'll take a roll call, Autobin Thorpe. You here? Switching it up today, put you first. Auto Roman O'Neill, you're here. Okay, I'm present also. Um, is there a motion to approve the agenda as written? Send them. Second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Is there a motion to approve the minutes as they from the last meeting as presented? Moved. Second. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. All right. Thanks so much for pairing with us as we got started with things. Folks, the floor is yours. Thank you. Um, Aisha Young, Director, Office of Community Services. Thank you for introduction. Sure. And hi, good morning, everyone. I'm Aaron Lee, Social Work Care Coordinator with the Office of Community Services. We'll go through our budget presentation. This year is a little over than three, but I feel like we accomplished so much. And just to give a little background, I've been here for two years, so I feel like I'm just still learning a little bit, but excited about all the things that we've done so far. So we focused a lot on rebranding because when I first started, or when I got here, um, we didn't have a distinguished um identity, I should say. A lot of people confused us with community action agency, or they didn't know exactly who we were or what our work entailed so I focused on, or I feel like we should have focused on the rebranding, and that's something that we did. We did a lot of new um materials working with uh Mitchell, helping us come up with new uh logos and icons, and just having a uniform branding. I don't know if you all seen the wellness man before, but the wrapping on the wellness man, just trying to, I don't want to say that the artwork wasn't great, but a lot of people thought it was like daycare, even though the pictures on there were um adults, but it still kind of looks like daycare. So just focusing on moving away from that so that we could really establish um the Office of Community Services. And as you all know, we house the grants or manage the grants. One thing that we didn't do were like site visits, some grant trainings, um, quarterly progress sessions. So we focused on some of that, um, hosting trainings around grant writing, sustainability, fundraising, AI training, those were um received very well. Site visits, visiting each uh grantee or whomever signs up. It wasn't mandatory, but we um asked everyone if they were interested for us to uh come to just sign up and we come out just to observe their work, see how we could better support them, and also put faces to names because I haven't seen a lot of people in person, just talk to them through email, and then the quarterly progress sessions was something that I came up with. I'm kind of calling it a progress party to just celebrate the work that the organizations are doing, also the success within the quarters, specifically first quarter and then fourth quarter, and then also engaging them in a way to submit their reports. It's like you can only kind of be celebrated for your success and what the organization is doing if you submit your reports and we can actually read to see you know your progress, and then we gave out some awards for that and just celebrated their success. Um, the health literacy and enrollment in medical building. This is something new. Our enrollment assistant Evie Hernandez, um, she became a certified navigator through Maryland Health Connection. We also became a they call it something different, but uh an organization that can certify people to become certified um navigators, and this way they can help people sign up for health care through healthcare.gov. So she can walk them through the whole process of how to sign up for care, understanding health insurance, you know what a deductible is, how to pick the best plan. Um, she's been working on that as well. So that's fairly new. She started last open enrollment, which was November 1st.