We will uh finish up today with the legal department.

It is great to see our city attorney, Arturo Michelle, and also being joined by Mirabel Torres.

And they will at this time give the FY2027 proposed budget presentation.

City attorney, the floor is yours.

Thank you.

So you all have this on your screen.

Now I have to just figure out how to scroll through it.

Well scroll.

Okay.

Yeah, so the first is just the table of contents.

On strategic alignment, we've tried to put our various sections in the areas of the mayor's priorities.

So I think that's kind of self-explanatory what you see there.

On the next screen is it's expenditure by funds.

We we tap into the general fund, also the property and casualty fund, mainly to pay settlements, and then the workers' compensation fund.

And it's been pretty static.

There hasn't been a lot of change in that.

On the next slide, you can see we're very heavily in personnel.

Um general fund funds most of it.

We have some from property and casualty, but a chunk of that has to be used for settlement.

And then there's a workers' comp component.

If you look at the expenditures by program, which is the following slide, slide number six.

Yeah, uh many of the change numbers are relatively small.

You will see that contracts has changed, has been an increase in part because there's been more activity there.

There's been a decrease in general counsel because we we've lost some personnel.

And then you if you look further down, you see real estate has a bump, and a lot of that is to adding people, but primarily from the hope uh three percent increase.

In the administrative services, the following slide, um you will see you know we're trying to find a way to measure it, and we don't really have a good way to do it.

Simply listing the number we are handling, I think reflects little about our efficiency.

So we're we're trying to find a way to better track that.

Um there's clearly a large number of discovery matters and subpoenas, and interestingly, in municipal court, we have a pretty sophisticated defense bar here in Houston, and they have a tendency to use the uh discovery process as a means to slow down the prosecution.

So that's something that we constantly struggle and fight in the motion hearings.

Um, you know, before our municipal court judges.

Claims and subrogation, which is the following slide, it's it's at slide eight.

Uh what we're trying to do is see how many we can resolve at the at a lower level to clear it because if it doesn't get cleared, it moves on to our torts and civil rights group.

And you know that that takes a number of times.

What we're trying to do is get these um resolved at the lowest level, and that's really our efficiency mark.

Um if you look at slide number nine, you'll see what happens when it goes into torts.

And I think we've done pretty well in terms of claims where that we get resolved and claims we we have no payment, but we also have to balance this with um the ability to just move through our our docket.

So there's a certain mentality that we have to be able to settle some, and we should be settling the ones that we can because otherwise we're just gonna get bogged down and won't won't have sufficient personnel to handle that.

On contracts, uh you will see that uh, you know, we generally complete within you know, in the time that's being requested.

One thing we struggle with in and generally within the department is is uh paying our lawyers, you know, we're below market.

We've lost a number of contract lawyers recently, and so it's really kudos to Martin and his group that we're able to get through as many contracts.

But that's uh a constant issue that we face in the legal department is how do we retain lawyers?

Um when you look at the following slide, um, you know, that is again a uh, you know, contract opinions, contracts handle, it's it's really more of the same.

Uh when you get into general counsel, we have a number of ordinances that we deal with, and you know, TPIA requests continue to increase.

So that takes up a huge percentage of time of what our lawyers do, and we use a rotation system where all of our lawyers are involved in TPIA, which I think works well because everyone needs to be knowledgeable about that.

There are emergency situations where things come into play, and every one of our lawyers needs to be knowledgeable about how to address that.

In general litigation, um, you know, we obviously have a number of lawsuits defend and lawsuits that we file.

Um we have in terms of outside council use, most of it has been in the condemnation realm, uh, because that takes up an increasing amount of of time, and these are sort of bet the company type cases.

The Texas Constitution language on eminent domain varies from the US Constitution, and the Texas Supreme Court has been picking up on that, and has the tendency has been to award more to uh to condemnees, and so that puts a city between a rock and a hard place.

For example, um you want to have a uh flood control regulations.

If you don't have that, um, the homeowners cannot get federal insurance.

But if but to the degree we put um regulations in place, we get more uh contested condemnation matters, and so we're faced between providing the basis for insurance and uh effectively paying more to condemn property that we need for our drainage and expansion.

So uh we use outside counsel pretty frequently because we have got a couple big cases coming before the Texas Supreme Court where I think this is going to come to a head in labor employment and and civil service.

Uh one of the main focuses has been to increase training so that we're able to provide more consistent training to the various departments because training, as you all know, is not just a matter of hearing at once.

You have to go back and make sure it but almost like osmosis that people really begin to understand what's needed so we have less issues, we have a better relationship with our unions, hope, and so on.

And you can see the so the number of uh matters that we've handled on that.

Uh in municipal prosecution, we've highlighted there the dangerous dog cases that we've had pretty good success with.

Um what I mentioned before about municipal uh prosecution holds very true.

We get a tremendous number of uh matters, and we tend to get bogged down because of the discovery requests.

So we try to be efficient in how we look at these.