The El Paso City Council convened for a work session to address critical internal audit reforms, develop a comprehensive housing strategy, and adjudicate a natural gas rate case. The session featured presentations on a needs assessment for the internal audit department, a detailed housing inventory and gaps analysis, and public commentary on utility rates. The Council unanimously denied Texas Gas Service's consolidation proposal and authorized outside counsel for related utility filings, while also approving a new cross-functional team to drive housing policy implementation.
Ms. Prime, good morning. Good morning, Mayor. And good morning, everyone. This is a meeting of the El Paso City Council, and it's a work session for Monday, November 17th, 2025. It is 905 a.m. Mayor Johnson is present and presiding in Council Chambers along with Mayor Potem Chavez. Representative Acevedo, Representative Maldonado Rocha, Representative Boyatrejo, Representative Nino, Alternate Mayor Potem Piero, Representative Limon, and Representative Canales. Mayor, we have a quorum. Great. Representative Canales, would you lead us in the pledge, please? All right, we have a number of presentations today. We're going to get started with uh number one, Miss Bryant. Yes, sir. Item number one is discussion and action on the state of Al Pasos Internal Audit, current state, maturity and needs assessment prepared by Weaver and T well LLP. Good morning, guys. Good morning. All right. Getting it pulled up here. It'll eventually show up. There we go. There we go. Good morning, Mayor, representatives of council. It's our pleasure to be here today from representatives of Weaver that conducted this assessment. My name is Brandon Tannis, and the partner that led the engagement, joined by my colleague Holly Hart, director who led the day to day and interacted with all of you all as well. And so it's our pleasure to come back to this council meeting to really talk about the roadmap and the recommendations that we made in the really internal audit current state maturity and needs assessment. And so to take us back a little bit, we were back in front of you all on June 23rd, where we talked about the initial results of this assessment. And so we talked about the initial results, the recommendations. Following that, we met with the then city auditor and his uh his team to talk about those recommendations to get some additional feedback. And then from there, we built what we're going to kind of focus a lot more of our time today, talking about the roadmap. So the recommendations and the roadmap of how do you get uh to those next steps. And so I will click this. And so to remind the the council of our scope. And so the scope of engagement was to assess the current structure, the organization, the roles, responsibilities, and practices that were implemented by the city's internal audit department, and the coordinating activities to determine if they reflect the best practices and have the tools, resources, and capabilities really to address the city's needs. And so this review assessed the functions of effectiveness through the lens of independence, transparency, accountability, and alignment with stakeholder expectations, which is everyone here along with uh city management. And an emphasis on how internal audit delivers value to the city and its constituents accordance with two sets of standards. The first one is uh commonly referred to as the Red Book, so the Institute of Internal Auditors Global Internal Audit Standards, and then the yellow book, which is the GAO's government audit standards, uh, looking at those requirements and guidance as well. But to clarify, this was not a peer review. Um, would you also have a peer review in your internal audit department that does a deep dive into your work papers and quality control and things like that? This you know has many elements of that, but is not considered a peer review itself and really looks at best practices of the internal audit department. And so we assessed in our scope uh and used a customized maturity model. And so we'll talk about that here in a second a little bit more to really assess and have benchmarking for the current practices. Again, we had two sets of standards that we talked about also with the COSO integrated risk management framework and the capability maturity model integration and frameworks. And so when we did the system assessment, a lot of this was a focus on alignment with standards, the peer review that was being already performed, and focus on the current maturity level. And when we talk about maturity, is where do we want to be in the sense of you know having best practices, having new systems, and how do we approach the risk that impacts the city and looking at short and long-term improvement initiatives and how those are aligned with the city's strategic plans and risk and so forth. So a summary of our procedures, we did do a detailed analysis of the internal audit's policies, procedures, work papers, and the reporting. We also had interviews with stakeholders, including city management, the council, the FOAC, and we performed those in the in the beginning in February. And I'll turn here in a minute to our project timeline that gives a little bit more detail on that. We did also benchmarking against peer city practices, leading industry models, also an analysis of internal control charter, I mean the internal audit charter along with the hotline practices, an evaluation of the internal audit function against that maturity assessment and that model looking at the current state strengths and areas for improvement and of course the capability gaps. Then we had a development of a really tailored and very detailed action, both short-term and long-term action items that you will find in that report that takes you from your current state all the way to you know implementation to the maturity level that you all have decided you would like to achieve.