Welcome back to this monthly meeting of the Governance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee of Denver City Council.

Thanks for joining us for the discussion.

The Governance and Intergovernmental Relations Committee starts now.

All right, good morning everyone.

It is Tuesday, August 18th.

I apologize for our delayed start.

This is the governance and international government and governmental international.

Wow.

It's been one of those days already, all right.

Um this is the governance committee.

I'm Amanda Sawyer.

I'm the chair of this committee.

I also have the honor of representing the residents of District 5.

Before we get started with our two items today, I want to do a round of introductions and I will start to my left.

Hi everyone.

Sadana Gonzalez Gutierrez, one of your council members at large.

Hi, good morning, Darrell Watson.

District 9.

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

I mean Torres West Denver District 3.

Kevin Flynn, Southwest Denver's District 2.

Great.

And do we have anyone online?

No one online.

Fantastic.

Thank you.

So our first item is 1190, and uh the Office of Human Resources is here to present.

I will let you guys introduce yourselves and take it away, and then we'll have public comment and then we will move to Councilmember questions.

Great.

Thank you so much.

Um, Madam Chair, members of council, my name is Marissa Pacheco.

I'm the classification and compensation director for OHR here at the City and County of Denver.

I'm joined today by a couple of my um colleagues who will be available to answer questions as well.

Alison Moore, uh senior assistant city attorney with the city attorney's office, soon to be assistant director, I might add.

And uh Blair Malloy, who is the classification and compensation supervisor for OHR.

So appreciate this opportunity to come and speak to the committee today and provide a briefing on an ordinance that will be making its way through the process over the next couple of weeks connected to a classification study involving safety positions within the city.

So to begin with, I just wanted to provide a brief background on this study.

A lot of um a lot of things have happened with this study to get us to here today, so I wanted to make sure that you have the history on this.

Um to provide background, the study started back in 2024, actually, late 2024.

We received position audit requests from one of our agencies, and as is standard protocol, uh, we collected what are known as PDQs or position description questionnaires from the affected employees to evaluate their duties and responsibilities.

Upon review of those PDQs, it was initially determined by OHR that not all, but a good portion of the duties that were listed were not exempt under the Fair Labor Standards Act, even though the position is currently exempt under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

So that prompted what is a standard review by the City Attorney's Office to verify that our initial assumptions were correct.

Those were verified by the city attorney's office, and that then prompted a broader review of all of the classifications throughout the city and the incumbents to make sure that we weren't missing other classification issues.

The review involved approximately uh 29 employees across five agencies.

And to be clear, this is kind of uh an outline of the position, the classification series that we're talking about.

There are five positions in the series.

Um safety and industrial hygiene professional one, there's a professional two, an administrator, a supervisor, and a manager.

And as the study progressed, it became clear that really the issues that we were seeing with um in terms of exemption were at that administrator and professional two level as we were going through that process.

So in May of 2025, um, going back about a year now, uh, we made a recommendation to the Career Service Board that after the review that was conducted by OHR and confirmed by the City Attorney's Office, that both the administrator and the professional two should change from an exempt status to a non-exempt status and therefore be eligible to earn overtime.

This recommendation um predates my time with the city, so if you have historical questions, Blair will be happy to answer those.

But um, needless to say, um, there was some unhappiness from the employees that were affected by this, and they expressed their um scrutiny of the study.

And um, so that prompted the career service board to ask OHR to go back and do some additional review to include job shadowing as well as uh the city attorney's office to do a deeper dive review into the data to make sure that we were not missing anything.

So, since that time with the Career Service Board back in May, we have some post-May 2025 activities.

We did partner with our HR business partners within OHR to do job shadowing that occurred October through December of 2025.

There was a slight delay between the Career Service Board meeting and those job shadowing activities because we had layoffs, and so those took the precedent in terms of staff time and resources.

But we did engage in those for October through December of last year.

The City Attorney's Office then began their legal analysis and review in December.

That concluded in April of this year.

They shared their findings with OHR.

Recommendations were developed based on those findings, and then we took it back to the Career Service Board in April, presented a briefing to the Career Service Board then, and then again in May for the official class notice.