Good afternoon, everyone.

It is 1 30, and we will reconvene the budget and fiscal affairs committee for the HITS budget workshop presentation at this time.

I'd like to recognize some council members in attendance.

Councilmember Julian Ramirez, Councilmember Mary Nan Huffman.

We also have staff from Councilmember Thomas' office, staff from Councilmember Carter, Councilmember Martinez, and Councilmember Alcorn's office.

And then online, we have Mayor Pro Tem Castax Tatum watching.

So at this time, Director, if you are ready, we can begin your budget presentation.

This is a good chair.

I don't usually get so tall.

So thank you, Chair, Vice Chair, for hosting me today.

I'm pleased to present the HITS Department budget to City Council.

This is my tenth time presenting this amazing department's budget to you.

So I do want to say a huge thanks, starting first with my partners in finance.

This, of course, you know very well.

This is Will Bryant.

He's Chief Director Dubowski's Chief of Staff, but he also manages the financial analysis folks who manage a very complex budget for HITS in our revolving fund.

So thanks to Will Bryant and his staff he has back here.

We have CJ Johnson, Caria Askew, Darren, and Kabita, who have all been working tirelessly to get this budget presentation done.

I also want to acknowledge nearly my entire executive team are here on the front row, so I do want them to all stand up.

You can also find their pictures and their titles in the appendix of our presentation.

And I owe them a deep debt of gratitude.

These are the folks, quite frankly, I think this is the most professional and high performing executive team that we have had for the HITS department through its existence.

So a huge thank you to those folks.

They're the ones along with their teams who support them, who are the ones that make things happen and make positive change.

So with that, let's go to the next slide.

Thank you, guys.

And this is just the agenda.

You've seen this for every department that comes before you, so we can go to the next one.

This slide shows the alignment of HIT's 19 programs to four of Mayor Whitmeyer's strategic priorities.

And three that are relatively new.

We just introduced last year, and those include the full consolidation of HPD technology, parks and recreation IT, legal IT, and the two that are new this year are the consolidation of Houston Airport System Cyber, as well as the Houston Public Library IT organizations.

Next for public safety, followed by 11% to government that works and one percent for quality of life priorities.

Next slide.

So this is a fun one.

The plans to eliminate the budget gap.

And so in this particular slide, the largest uh opportunity that we identified was in the telecommunication support services area.

That $2.3 million dollars was made up of several chunks that I'm gonna quickly highlight for you.

The first is five hundred and fifteen thousand dollars that we identified after our infrastructure team's analysis of citywide expenditures to the cellular telephone contract.

Um, and there are significant savings opportunities.

This $515,000 excludes Houston Airport System and HPD because they are billed separately directly to those departments.

This $515 represents HITS asking each of the other consuming departments to cut their cellular subscriptions by 10%, and that's based on the analysis that we did identifying a number of zero usage devices.

The next chunk is 268,000.

This is the reduction of some very old legacy plain old telephone service lines as we replace them with more modern communications vehicles.

The next is 655,000.

Again, this is a shout out to Burt Corford and Omar Farouk for excellent negotiating on our new cellular services contract.

That 655,000 is specifically for improved rates for those cellular services that we consume.

And then finally, in this category, $935,000 reduction.

This was a planned migration as part of our next generation network project, which you'll hear a little bit more about in this presentation.

But this is modernizing the telephone circuits that connect all of our network across the city together.

So the next category, which I'm lumping together both end user compute services and the enterprise applications reductions, 350 of that, 350,000 of that was again improved negotiation on rates under our new Microsoft 365 Enterprise Agreement, as well as making the decision to subscribe to some third-party Microsoft support, which is cheaper than the Microsoft directly sourced services.

So it's one way that we skinnyed down the budget.

The next chunk is 600,000, where again we negotiated a new agreement for electronic signature, and we're able to bring down the cost of those services.

Next slide.

So for perspective, when we set the HPD consolidation aside, combined with those proposed budget reductions and also layering in the anticipated contractual increases.

So we largely stayed flat except for those areas where we're incorporating new organizations that were not previously part of our budget, or in the case of HPD, which we can transition to now.

We needed to make sure that they are whole in that some of the things where they are growing, such as cadet onboarding new cadets and increasing their staff, you still have to purchase additional technology to ensure that those officers are equipped to do their jobs.

So that HPD cadet portion, we submitted a PBJ to increase our FY27 budget by $6.8 million, and that is to buy those cadets all the things that they need, whether it's body cameras, cell phones, software licensing, those sorts of things.

The remaining parts that key points that increase that budget were that consolidation of HAS Cyber, that's $811,000 that was not previously in our budget.

The consolidation of Houston Public Library, that's $2.1 million, 14 FTEs that are migrating over to HITS effective July 1st.

And the HOPE increase, which all departments are having to budget for at 935,000, as well as what you normally hear from me every year, which are those contractual increases for various services.