biweekly meeting of the Finance and Business Committee of Denver City Council.

Join us for the Finance and Business Committee starting now.

All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Finance and Business Committee. Today is

Tuesday, February 10th. My name is Serena Gonzalez-Gutierrez. I'm one of your council

members at large and also chair of the committee. We will start with introductions before we get

into what is on today's agenda. Just double checking that we have no one online as of yet,

but we may have some people joining us there, and we'll start with introductions over here on my

left. Thank you, committee chair, Darrell Watson, fine district nine. Good morning, Paul Cashman,

Good morning, Amanda Sandoval, Northwest Denver, District 1.

Good morning, Amanda Sawyer, District 5.

Good morning, Diana Romero-Campbell, Southeast Denver, District 4.

Okay, well, I'll keep an eye out in case anyone does join us online.

We have one action item today being presented to us by the famous Amandas.

I'm just kidding.

Council President and Councilwoman Sawyer will be presenting this action item for us,

and then we do have some items on consent.

I will hand it over to you to take it away.

Thank you all.

So before you, we have what's called the Budget Reporting Ordinance.

So what are we trying to solve for?

This ordinance is about transparency and good governance.

Council, as we all know, is responsible for approving the budget,

and we should have regular standardized insight

into how it's performing throughout the year.

This is not, I just want to set the table.

This isn't about mistrust.

It's about building a shared understanding

of our financial health.

Why is this needed?

Today, council does not receive consistent,

routine budget updates.

We rely on ad hoc information from the administration

rather than standardized comparable data

because we only get information mid-July.

And it's a snapshot in time.

And then we're handed, we go through the budget hearings

and we're handed a proposed budget.

On-call contracts are approved by council,

but we don't often know when they're used

for what purpose and how much is spent.

And the gap limits our ability to do our jobs effectively

and proactively.

The purpose and intent of this is,

what this ordinance does is it codifies

quarterly general fund reporting from the Department of Finance into City Council.

So if you're thinking about, remember when we all read into the announcement section

of our City Council agenda for the bond?

It was just last month.

That's how this would function.

So once a quarter on the City Council agenda under communications, this would be read into

the record.

It requires quarterly reporting from agencies on on-call contracts, use, and spending,

ensures reports are clear, readable, and accessible to both council and the public,

and allows council to track trends over time and reduce surprises,

and creates a structured way for council to flag issues early.

So if you see an issue flagged, you can then contact a committee chair and say,

hey, I want more insight into this.

then we can use our committee structures to actually gain more insights and not after the fact.

One thing, I think it should be all at the top of your inbox.

Councilwoman Sawyer sent it, I believe, on Thursday or Friday.