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.

Next slide.

This is another view of the history of our budget over the last few years, and you can see that HIITS is budgeted completely in the central revolving fund, which means that all of the services that we provide are in service to all of you and the other departments who consume them.

So we revolve those services and the costs back to the departments that are consuming them.

It does give you a clear picture by having that all in revolving fund when you look at their budgets, you see that total cost of operating versus having IT or other central services squirreled away and considered separately.

So you see this charge in their restricted accounts, and you also see it reflected as offsetting revenue for the HITS budget at the end of the year.

Next slide.

Okay, this is the personnel versus non-personnel comparison, and this is an example where HITS is the opposite of most of the general fund departments that you hear from.6 million.

The vast majority of our budget is in services and supply.

So think hardware, software licensing, cloud services, data center, cellular, all of those sorts of things that departments need to operate their business.

One thing I do want to point out is that in the Ernst and Young efficiency study, they did observe that Houston has fewer IT personnel than the majority of comparable cities within the state of Texas, even those who are smaller than we are.

And so we do run lean.

When we last year at the tail end of FY25, when the city went through the voluntary municipal retirement option, the combination of HIITs and the incoming Houston police department technology group, we did lose a net of 24 positions.

And so this year, when Mayor Whitmeyer asked all departments to come up with ways to sharpen the pencil and tighten the budget up, we have to look at services.

We can't keep going back to personnel.

So what you're gonna hear from me, some already and some throughout this presentation, is where we look for opportunities to get better pricing, but also to ask the question sometimes that might even be a policy decision is do we really need the demand for all the services that we ask for?

Okay.

Next slide.

So this is another way of looking at it, just with a little bit deeper breakdown by the programs.

It shows that our total FY27 operating budget is 161.3 million.

I mentioned this is 10.8% higher, does include all contractual increases.

I do want to draw your attention to at least the top four areas where we have increases.

So these larger variances in dollars, not percentage, because sometimes that percentage is misleading.

They're not very big money.

The one of the big ones is enterprise applications at 1.8 million.

Another is HFDIT support at 1.25, and this is an example where I want to emphasize we are right sizing the IT resources that are needed to meet the Houston Fire Department's needs.

This is an example where we did not do a net increase, we actually removed some from the HPD side of the house, and we added some to the HFD side.

So HPD's chargeback from HIITS actually went down from a personnel perspective, and HFDs went up.

The next one, HPD support, $6.5 million.

I just used the example earlier where things that weren't in their technology budget, like cadet technology, those are the kinds of things we're adding back, so that it's clearly visible of how we're going to accommodate those new cadet classes.

And then as well, the Houston Public Library IT support, newly consolidated, that's the 2.17 million.

Next slide.

Okay, so now we're going to move into the programs.

Before we do that, I want to address the performance metrics up front.

There's a lot of these programs and metrics, so I don't want to read through each one of them.

Most of the HIITS performance metrics continue to be output oriented while we measure things like system uptime or ticket resolution time.

And these are important to measure.

But one thing that we're going to be working on, we started in 26, we're going to be continuing to evolve this in FY27, is to really implement that turn the curve methodology to reflect both effort type of metrics, which would be how many things do we do or how well do we do it, but we're also going to be layering things in like effect.

So what is the who is better off in our customer departments or in the constituents who consume and utilize the services.

One of the things that we did in FY26 to help us get better at doing those kind of meaningful constituent-facing metrics is to create a dedicated performance function in the director's office.

That was part of our reorganization that we are almost finished with implementing.

Start the process of evangelizing that turn the curve methodology within our organization, and you can expect to see on a monthly or bi-monthly basis where we begin to refine these metrics.

So now I'm going to move on to talking about this first program.

This administrative services program helps us ensure the efficient management of resources not only within our department but on behalf of all city departments.

So this group does things like citywide contracts for IT, data privacy, public information requests, asset management, those sorts of things.

Nearly one-third of this budget is our restricted account chargebacks.

So just like I charge other departments for IT services, the finance department charges me for their services, as does HR, ARA and so forth.

The next major category that contributes to this budget is management consulting.

One chunk is about 299,000.

That is for Gartner IT research services.

We use those extensively, both for written articles as well as analyst calls and analysis on certain types of initiatives.

And then we have a leadership and management consulting contract for 122,000.

Next slide.

Okay, the 311 program, obviously, our intent is to provide the technology services that both ARA and the public who utilize those services and to ensure that they are available and intuitive and streamlined experiences.

Major expenses in this program are the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement that provides the software licensing for 311, 394,000, the 311 call center, that's 450,000, and the citizen interaction platform, which you know of as C Click Fix app, that's 98,000.

And I do want to draw attention.

I know council member Alcorn is not here, but one of the questions that she did submit was about the target for our submission on online versus call-in tickets.

We did make an adjustment to that.

It was an error to have it as low as it was shown.

So the version that I'm showing right now with that 25% goal is accurate.

Next slide.

So community development and regulation applications, this is specifically for us to provide streamlined permitting and inspection service processes for the Department of Neighborhoods, Houston Fire Department, and ARA.

You'll find some interesting statistics about this program in the appendix on page 49.

It's noteworthy that this program has generated over 12 million dollars in revenue year to date in FY26, specifically for the Houston Fire Department, and then for ARA, that year-to-date revenue so far is 13.6 million.

Major expenses for this program in for licenses, that's 709,000, and Microsoft Enterprise Agreement licensing, that's 540,000.

Next slide.

As you know, our cyber security program's objective is to reduce the cyber-related risk to the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of city systems data and information.

Now I mentioned earlier that we would be working on metrics.

The cyber phishing training and effectiveness is an example of one that we used in our EY workshop, and we developed a new metric that you will see us in the early part of FY27 putting on this program and probably substituting for one of the other ones.

One thing I do want to point out the major expenses for this program include our security enterprise license software subscription, 2.8 million dollars, PCI monitoring.

So that helps us ensure that when constituents are using credit cards to purchase services, whether it be permitting or other sorts of things with the city, that we help ensure that we comply with federal regulations to protect that payment card information.

That's 395,000.

We have a threat intelligence software solution is 495,000, anti-ransomware capabilities, which is 244.

And one that all of you participate in and know and hopefully love is cyber security awareness training.

That's our no-before solution, 130,000 citywide.

So I'm not just talking about IT grants, I'm talking all state-funded grants.

So everyone in the city has to band together to ensure that we take and complete that training so that every city department who normally expects to get state-funded state grant funding can do so.

Last year in October, our completion rate was 86.2%.

We are certainly looking forward for that number to go up every year.

So please help us help you and get that done.

So the goal of this program is to ensure that the city has adequate capacity and access to data center services.

This means both physical data center equipment.

Some of you actually went on a tour with our team, and you got to see firsthand what that looks like.

Major expenses in this program include Microsoft Azure, which is cloud hosting, $2.3 million dollars, data center lease for the facility that some of you visited, that was $917,000.

Third-party Microsoft support, $546,000.

Microsoft Server Cloud Licensing.

So this is not the end user licensing, but it's licensing for the servers and systems that run our applications.

That's $460,000.

We also have $275,000 for modest staff augmentation services.

This is a combination of both architect level support on our compute side of the house as well as some project management for some of the major network and telecom initiatives we've been doing.

We also spend $331,000 on virtualization and $120,000 on storage management, not like file cabinet storage, but digital.

And then finally, Amazon Web Hosting is $340,000.

Next slide.

End user compute services program.

So quite simply, this is the stuff that you probably use every day.

It's laptops and computers, it's the patching that we do on those devices.

It's the Microsoft 365 application, which includes things like email, Word, Excel, PowerPoint Teams, and several others.

It also includes collaboration services and products like a Microsoft Surface Hub that you have in your conference rooms.

Major expenses for this program include $8.1 million for that Microsoft Enterprise Agreement, and again, that's the end user-facing portion of the licensing.

The RICO contract, which is multifunction print and copier, $1.6 million.

Email archiving, which is our proof point archive, $850,000.

Next slide.

Okay, the goal of the Enterprise Applications Program is really to look across the entire city and identify common needs and functions that we can deploy enterprise applications that can more efficiently support a large number of users and in many cases every single department.

So you can think of that M365 as one example, but you could also think of things like our ERP system for procurement, financial management, human capital management, those sorts of things.

Major expenses in this program include GIS annual licensing at $2.8 million, SAP, $1.8 million, time and attendance, that's our UKG Chronos solution, $1.3 million.

What you think of as HR1, which is our ERP human capital management portal, $1.5 million.

There's also a planning department transfer for $996.

There's what I hope you have grown to know and love is our e-signature licensing that allows us to be much more efficient with documents.

That's $534,000.

We did negotiate better rates on that contract, by the way, so FY27 is an improvement.

We have contract and procurement management licensing at $390,000.

Our IT service management portal service now, which we have expanded in this last year, not only for additional modules, but we are just finalizing the migration of HPD onto the ServiceNow portal that the rest of the city utilizes rather than having their own standalone product.

This also includes public information service request portal, GovQA at $460,000, talent management, which is both training and performance evaluation, $222,000, and the contingent workforce portal, that's the time approval for temps, $186,000.

Next slide.

So this is for the IT personnel and services that supports our 911 call takers that office at the emergency center.

Major expenses include the CAD application licensing and maintenance, that's $1.5 million, hardware maintenance, $146,000, and CAD and related database support, which is $234,000.

Next slide.

Houston Fire Department.

So I've already talked a little bit about this, that we're upright sizing their IT staff to help them achieve their goals from the standpoint of application modernization and data and analytics and those sorts of things.

Another key expense besides the personnel is HFD's records management system that's image trend at 575,000.

Next slide.

Houston Police, we've talked about quite a bit.

That is a large organization, so personnel is a significant portion of this program.

However, they are also a large consumer of cellular services.

Their Verizon Wireless portion is 5.5 million, and that represents about 50% citywide of all cellular services.

The next big one is Microsoft Enterprise License Agreement for HPD, which is 4 million.

Now we did just recently consolidate this into the citywide Microsoft tenant.

We just finished that at the end of March, but this is their allocated portion for consuming those services.

And by the way, in addition now that they're in our same citywide tenant, you'll note that you have better visibility from a team's availability standpoint, SharePoint sites that we might share where appropriate, and also email nomenclature.

So they have Jettison, the Houston Police.org, and they are now Houston TX.gov as the rest of the city is.

She has been amazing to work with, and the HITS team is looking forward to finding ways that we can add value to helping her organization achieve their goals.

Next slide.

Houston Public Works IT support.

This is where we have some staffing split across two major functions.

The majority are in support of the permitting center and are integrated with the HUE Permits project team, and we'll be maintaining that once it goes live.

We also have two cybersecurity personnel in that category in that program.

Next slide.

To process citations, judicial processes, citizen inquiries, and payments.

There is a slide in the appendix on slide 48 that shows some statistics about what we provide through the CSMART application.

It's noteworthy that Judge Santos and her team are able to collect just so far, year to date, nearly $24 million in revenue utilizing these systems and platforms that we provide.

The major expenses related to this program include the payment management system for 77,000, hardware maintenance, 42,000, document management and software licensing that's 59,000, scanning services, which are 35,000, and system maintenance job scheduling, which is 34,000.

Next slide.

Network services program is another one that I'm super proud of what we've been able to accomplish over the last couple of years.

The goal of this program is to provide those services that connect all 350 city facilities to our data centers, to the public as a whole, and allow all of these IT systems to work and communicate.

This is one that we have made dramatic improvement in FY26 associated with our next gen project, which was a two-year project.

We started on it in 25, and through just sheer grit and determination, Burt Corfort and Omar Farouk, who is his assistant director over Network and Telephony, they have been able to push their team really hard along with our vendor partner to accomplish what those vendors have reported to us as one of the most progressive and forward thinking network redesigns of any public entity in the US in recent years.

And so we're very proud of that, and they are going to get it done before World Cup, which was our objective to ensure that everyone has a solid network.

You might think of that data network like the foundation in your home.

Nobody really wants to care about it until it fails, and then it could become disastrous.

So the pre-work that we put into ensuring continuous improvements, security modifications, capacity, redundancy, those are all those things that help us maintain a solid digital foundation for everything that the city does.

Major expenses in this program are the network equipment warranty and replacement support, 900,000, as well as network and telecom software license enterprise agreement, that's 2.2 million.

Next slide.

Parks and recreation.

We talked a little bit about this earlier.

Our main objective is to support Director Allen and his team on many of the IT needs that they have not had sufficient support for historically.

That includes things like work order systems, business intelligence reporting, program registration for many of the things that your constituents go to parks facilities to participate in, as well as concession amenities.

Next slide.

Project management program in short is responsible for delivering projects to the agreed upon scope, schedule, quality budget, communicate status, and project priorities, identify risks, and those sorts of things.

The main expense in this program is personnel, but we do have about $29,000 in training initiatives that go on through the PMO.

Next slide.

This provides the citywide radio system that not only are first responders utilize, but also key departments that are often considered first responders like Public Works and Solid Waste.

So major expenses for this program include 1.8 million dollars for tower leases, insurance fees for 638, and interfund electricity Partnership with Harris County.

This is where we share a facility at the Greens Road Radio Shop.

We also share, you probably remember this that we share the maintenance of the overall TechSwarr radio system over this geographic region.

One note that I do want to remind you about this team does sell radio services to more than 30 external agencies, including other smaller municipalities, police departments, school districts, but also NASA.

So we're pretty proud of that one.

They generate roughly 1.8 million dollars in revenue annually.

Next slide.

The telecommunications program is to keep connected both wired and wireless for voice communications.

It includes major expenses in this program of wired telecommunications circuits, which I would add is not just voice, right?

That includes data circuits as well.

Verizon Wireless, 5.2 million dollars.

That's every department except HPD and HAS.

Telephone Voice Managed Services, that's a network operations center, 708,000 communications cabling, 450,000, and our Unified Contact Center support.

This is 31 call centers that various city departments leverage.

275,000 for that.

Next slide.

So now we're going to talk about revenue.

I've mentioned one of them already, that 1.8 million from the radio services, but the other one is one we're super proud of our negotiating power in the Verizon Wireless contract.

That first year rebate was $4 million, which my colleague here already received the check.

They don't let me touch it, but it goes into the revenue fund.

And that was up from last year's rebate, was only 1.2 million dollars.

So it was a significant increase, and it helped the city at a time when we really needed the revenue.

Next slide.

This is just looking at that another way.

As I mentioned, central revolving fund, our revenue equal equivalent is equal to our expenses when we charge those services back.

Next slide.

Another way to look at the revenue over years from 25 up through now.

Next slide.

Same thing by the breakdown.

Next slide.

So before I get to your questions, that does conclude my prepared remarks, but I do want to take this opportunity to share a few things with you.

Number one, thank you for all of the support that you guys have provided to the Houston IT department over the past 10 years.

Today's presentation marks my 10th and final budget presentation.

I'm going to be retiring at the end of June after 30 years of service to the city of Houston as a civil servant.

And for yours, because we don't get anything done without this body saying yes when we come to you and say this is what we need.

And I look forward to seeing what those rock stars can do.

So I think I told you, oh, one other thing that I wanted to share, which I thought was kind of a fun note.

My last day is actually June 19th, which of course is an incredibly important day for our country to commemorate the end of slavery.

It is also interestingly the same date, different year, that this body voted to create the Houston IT department 24 years ago.

So although back then it was called ITD, and over time, I want to say it was around 2012, it was sort of rebanded it rebranded Houston IT Services Department, but that creation of a central IT department was on June 19th of I think 2020.

So I thought, what an awesome day to end my 30-year career with this city.

So with that, I appreciate over the years all the tough questions that you asked us.

So with that, I will take any of your questions, and hopefully they're not too tough.

Thank you very much, Director, for your presentation.

Also for your years of service to the city.

A significant career in public service, and we're grateful to have had you for that long and for all the good that you've done with the city of Houston.

So thank you for that.

Thank you.

And your thorough presentation, a lot to cover there.

Some initial questions that I have.

I would like to start with the data centers.

Are there any plans to um increase our physical data center presence?

We do have plans to expand at the Houston Emergency Center.

That is one that is I'm gonna call it a quasi data center.

It's not fully equipped the way we really need it to be.

So there are some facility-related enhancements.

Um certainly they're well equipped from a power and cooling standpoint, but there are other areas within that computer room environment that we need to provide some additional capacity.

That is part of our goal.

Right now, our strategy is to continue for the current time being with one outsourced leased data center, one city-owned data center, and continue our mission to drive to the cloud.

So you will see us every year moving more and more services.

We do have things in the CIP to drive more things that are on premise up into uh cloud services.

Okay, good.

The follow-up question was you know, city-owned versus leased.

Um, one is city owned, one is leased, and then uh emphasis on transitioning to cloud.

That's correct, and we used to have two leased data centers that a few years ago we downsized to consolidate more into one and to move more to cloud.

So that was one of our opportunities to leverage cloud and reduce those leased expenses.

Gotcha.

And then you you talked about the consolidation from airport systems into IT for cyber, um, any future planned consolidations with respect to the airport system and hits.

We don't at this time uh we do provide not only to Houston Airport system but also to Houston Public Works.

We provide enterprise services to those departments.

So again, those are the things that are common systems and applications that everyone uses.

Um, at this time, both public works and HAS are continuing to operate the more niche related systems that are specific to their business operations.

The same is true even on the health department side.

We consolidated infrastructure because those were like services, as we have for quite some time for public works, provided their network and telephony functions, but from an applications and data uh standpoint, those departments continue to maintain some of their own staff and systems.

Thank you for that.

Um a couple weeks ago, we had uh an item come to council for OBO uh looking at ways to eliminate some manual data entry with um I think BIS now and SAP and you know we heard about some of those issues with uh timekeeping as well, manual data entry.

It looks like low-hanging fruit in terms of ways that we can be more efficient, save money.

Um are there other opportunities for that in the upcoming fiscal year uh where we're looking at that specifically?

Short answer is yes.

Um we work on those types of projects pretty much every year.

One of the really big ones that comes to mind is for the Houston Police Department and their migration to an electronic timekeeping and employee scheduling environment.

So today, from an employee scheduling standpoint, it's highly manual and efficient, and I'm sure you know there's been lots of discussion about that.

That is something that will be migrating to an electronic employee scheduling system that will feed into the city's um Kronos timekeeping system, which ultimately ties into our payroll system.

So those are some examples.

It's a big heavy lift because there are uh it's a large organization with some uh manual processes that we've got to rethink those business processes, but it's gonna be a good one, and I'm um excited to see what the team is able to accomplish with that.

Thank you.

I do want to note uh we have been joined by council member uh vice mayor pro tem Amy Peck, Councilmember Flickinger's staff is here as well as uh Chair Alcorn is present, and we also have staff from Councilmember Cayman's office and council member Jackson's office present for the presentation.

Um Chair Alcorn has a question.

I submitted some questions online, but oh my gosh, Lisa, I can't believe it.

Thirty years, that's great.

We have so enjoyed working with you.

You've just been a voice of calm and reason and answered every single question I've had throughout the years as a staffer and as a council member, and I just wish you all the best.

We will really miss you.

Thank you so much.

And I did see your questions.

One of them I don't think you had even come in yet, but on the 311 metric, you were right, that was an incorrect target.

It's already been updated on what I showed.

It's 25%.

Okay, great.

Thanks, Vice Mayor Pro Tempek.

Thank you, Vice Chair.

Um, I just want to say thank you so much for everything that you've done for the city of Houston in all of these years.

Um, all of the um different things that have been implemented with your department.

I have always trusted that it will be implemented correctly because you've been there to follow it all every step of the way.

So thank you so much for everything that you've done.

Um, my question is so as we are transitioning um the SAW waste department to um the combined utility system.

Is there anything on your end that needs to be transferred over?

Is there a cost or a savings associated with any of the transfer that's going to happen?

The short answer is yes, there's uh pretty substantial amount of work to be coordinated with um the finance department as well as public works and solid waste on moving those both personnel org unit areas as well as cost centers to align up under the new fund.

Uh it is my understanding that the latest effort that has been agreed upon uh between finance and HR and HIITS is that we are taking a small step first to simply point to the fund and that during FY27, we will do that deeper dive of helping those business units map to new cost centers.

So part of the problem is you don't want to overwhelm all of these entities like finance who have had huge heavy lifts right now, just getting us through the budget process and year-in close.

To try to do all of that right now would be risky.

So, do you have anything you need to add to that?

Okay, thank you.

Councilmember Ramirez.

Uh thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Director, congratulations on your upcoming retirement, 30 years uh in with the city.

You have definitely had a huge impact on city government, and we appreciate it.

Uh you've always been so informative and uh obviously very competent at what you do, and uh especially appreciate you working to keep our IT uh system safe, you know, against the threats that that we face uh these days.

But thank you for everything.

We did submit a question online, so we'll await the response.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And last year, Director, you presented or you at least talked about um AI roadmap that uh hits has.

How's that progressed from last fiscal year to this current fiscal year?

So not as fast as we would like, but one of the things that we did as part of our department reorganization is we created a new group within the director's office that we're finally referring to as PIA, it's performance innovation and architecture.

And in fact, Raphael Louvre, who is right here, he's raising his hand, um, he was promoted to lead that part of our organization.

It also includes that uh dedicated performance metrics function, but a big part of what he's going to be helping Hits build is an AI governance function.

Um we as a city have to balance governance to ensure that we're doing things in a safe way, but not um prematurely holding departments back to be able to leverage this incredible tool.

I think I've mentioned before AI is both incredibly exciting and um thrilling, and it's also incredibly scary, and so we need to make good choices about how we deploy it.

So Raphael, he will not do this by himself.

AI governance is going to take every single one of these groups as part of hits as well as each of our but business customers to thoughtfully think through and just put a few guardrails in place to make sure that they're responsible deployment.

Thank you.

And uh Raphael, we look forward to to working with you and the rest of the team.

Um no other questions, so we can move on to public speakers at this time.

Thank you very much.

Would anybody like to oh Doug?

Okay.

You're up.

Good afternoon.

Um I just have to say one thing that's not related to my questions really, and that is when uh when there used to be the TTI committee that David Robinson uh chaired, Lisa would come and do presentations on her requests for hundreds of millions of dollars, it seemed like all kinds of money for the various things that she wanted.

And I told her at one point, and I just wanted to share it publicly because I think it's worth it, that uh the city was very lucky to have somebody like her when she probably could make a lot more money uh out in the public sector.

And uh I think that's obvious today with the report she just made, but uh the city's been very lucky to have her.

So uh regarding my questions directly.

Uh I had to work from the budget rather than her uh report, and uh I think it was probably the first page of the the HITS budget.

Uh they break down uh talking about how they hired or took in 14 people from the library and four people from uh Houston Airport systems.

That's a total of 18.

But when you look at the uh full-time equivalence uh from 26 estimate to 27, it's 48 uh people.

So I'd like to know what the that's like 30 more people uh than what they broke down uh in in their summary.

Then regarding uh the uh public radio, she talked about that, and I think I got the impression that all of our systems, all our emergency systems are on the same wavelength.

We all know there was a huge problem uh during 9-11 because the emergency uh units couldn't communicate with each other.

And I just want to confirm that all of our units are on the same frequency, I guess, and maybe even if we do support for lots of uh smaller organizations, they're on the same frequency.

So that's just a question I'd like to confirm.

Uh then uh regarding IT support for the police department and the fire department.

Uh there are five times as many uh employees allocated to the police than there are to the fire department, and the police department is not five times bigger than the uh fire department, and there maybe is a reason because they don't have all of the fire department systems, but it still seems like a huge difference uh that I think is worth taking a look at.

And then finally, it was uh talked about indirectly, uh, but they didn't address when we had a meeting uh a few weeks ago, and I think that uh I think that you uh brought up uh indirectly.

Uh we heard about how the fire department payroll was doing handwritten time cards.

I didn't hear that addressed today, but that is certainly low-hanging fruit uh in my book that really needs to be taken care of.

So good timing.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We have your questions, and we'll follow up with uh the answers.

All right, that concludes our budget workshop for hits.

We'll take a three minute break and then begin with ARA-