The El Paso City Council held a special meeting on July 8, 2025, beginning at 10:49 AM, to continue the presentation and discussion of the proposed FY 2025-2026 budget. City Manager Dionne Mack, Chief Financial Officer Robert Cortinas, and department directors presented budget overviews, key initiatives, and performance metrics. The meeting included presentations from Municipal Court, Code Enforcement, Capital Improvement, Streets & Maintenance, Airport, Information Technology, Human Resources, Community & Human Development, and Environmental Services. Two council members were excused (Trejo and Canales). No votes were taken; the meeting was a public work session to inform budget deliberations.
To the next worksess, the continuation. Special meeting. Yes, sir. Good morning. This is a special meeting of the El Paso City Council for Tuesday July 8th, 2025. It is 1049 AM. Mayor Johnson is present and presiding in Council Chambers, along with Mayor Pro Tem Chavez, Representative Acevedo, Representative Madonado Rocha, Representative Nino, Representative Limot, Representatives Trejo and Canales have requested to be excused from this morning's meeting. Item number one is for presentation and discussion, the FY twenty twenty five-twenty twenty-six budget as presented by the city manager. And we continue with a department presentations with municipal court, Miss Annabel Casas. Good morning, Annabelle Casas, uh municipal court uh director and happy to kick off the second day of our budget presentations. Um and also the other half are uh mayor um Mario D'Agostino's public safety team. So what do we do? We hold ourselves responsible and are held responsible by the citizens of this community to provide what we do day in day out with dignity, with impartiality, equity, courtesy, and efficiency. What you've seen through yesterday's presentations is an increase in salaries, which is again to retain our talent. So it's just matching what is coming into our court. What you see on our general fund and not general is just an adjustment to uh not having amnesty this year. So it's just kind of reverting back to where normal is um on positions. We're really good at maintaining and and really uh recruiting and and re keeping our talent. Um so we only have right now uh one uh actually one uh intern that we had part time. Uh we completed our grant successfully from the El Paso Bar Foundation. Texas Bar I'm sorry, the Texas Bar Foundation and um we have um but the pretty much uh our team is intact. Oh sorry. Thank you. Um in our uh banking, uh that you can talk to somebody, and this is actually talking to our downtown office, which is our busiest one. Uh we started our with our wisp uh with the office bond station um with this uh project and now we're adding to the additional uh bond stations, even to the newest one, which is on the upper east side. Um also we're adding an enhanced texting uh texting program to ease the case of resolution. So less clicks, more what you can do with your phone. We learned that a lot with our amnesty, what is working for our community and not, and what we still need to look forward to get some feedback to know what to do better. Um, one of the other areas that we wanted to improve on is connecting with our community uh by reaching out, having a person reach out. I know we use the phones a lot, but our community and being there as long as I have uh you want a human sometimes to remind you that you have um something pending. We all forget, and I know I've had family members who've had a parking ticket parking ticket, they forgot very windy days have caused that that issue. So, what we want to do is try to uh reach out to the community and case manage the cases meeting before they get to an enforcement, before they get to anything that might may impact the individual. So we're working actually in creating efficiencies within the department to add that and give time to our team uh to do it calmly and respectfully with our community. Um, also we want to reach out to all of you going to the community and really get to know municipal court. That's something that um also we we've noticed that we haven't done and we need to be better at. So we are gonna be reaching out to all of you, so you'll be seeing more of us and hopefully have more time to get to all of you and get to know my team as well. Um we're also working on a parking um self-schedule. You can do it yourself. It's one of our uh the tickets that actually you can control yourself, and it it has a faster timeline, so we want to be able to give you that flexibility, flexibility to actually schedule yourself. Um, of course, if anybody needs any help, they don't have to do that, but they can always reach out to us. Uh one of the major uh cleanups that we're doing is also the web page. It has a tremendous amount of information, but a lot of legal jargon that we really need to clean up to make it a little easier to navigate and also use the page with maybe new innovation after a cleanup to actually be able um to go forward with that. I'm sorry, I just clicked on it. Um of the key the key performances that we have, uh key performance indicators is a percent of court payments received um through the web. This is through going to our web page and making payments. Um, our target for this year is 70 percent. Um we usually reach our targets. Um community is always communicating with us, showing up or calling us. Uh, but that this is very useful. So right now we're at 67 percent.