Afternoon session of our budget workshops, and we will start off with public works and solid waste and one combined situation.

I see Director Randy Mackay and Samir Salanke, and also I see Director Hassan in the audience.

So we will get started with this presentation, and then we will end the day with the Houston Fire Department.

Um I want to recognize my colleagues who are here, Vice Chair Mario Castillo, staff from Councilmember Caroline Evan Shabazz, Councilmember Twila Carter, Councilmember Alejandra Salinas, Councilmember Joaquin Martinez, staff from Council Vice Mayor Pro Tem, Martha Castax Tatum, Councilmember Julian Ramirez, Councilmember Mary Nan Huffman, staff from Councilmember Abby Kamen's office, and Councilmember Fred Flickinger.

So welcome to all, and the floor is yours.

Director.

Thank you, Madam Chair, Council members.

It's uh it is very exciting to be here today with all of you to talk about this very important pivotal budget.

Before we jump in, I do just want to acknowledge uh seated here in chambers with us many members of our executive team and our finance team who helped make this possible and put this budget together.

Um we couldn't do it without them.

We're so grateful for their contributions and we're we're glad they can join us here.

Um as we start here on this first slide, just as just a little brief overview right now of our executive team.

We often call this the C suite.

Um this consists really of all of the operational service line heads.

And if you go to the next slide, we go into a little bit more detail on what each of those do.

Uh, Chris Butler, our chief operating officer, responsible for utility billing, code enforcement and compliance, which we oftentimes refer to as the Houston Permitting Center, and then transportation and drainage operations, uh, City Engineer OJ McFoy for infrastructure rehab, engineering standards and review, which is a portion of the Houston Permitting Center, as well as uh engineering facilities and infrastructure and design development.

Drew Molly is the city's chief water officer.

Everything in drinking water, wastewater, regulatory compliance, and utility development falls within his purview.

Seated next to me here, Samir Solanke, our chief financial officer.

All things money through public works runs through Samir.

Um, my chief of staff, Rena Vargis, is responsible for the administrative portion of the department, which includes communications, it includes city council liaison office, our strategic initiatives division, uh, everything within uh HR operations relative to the department as well as policy management and legislative affairs.

Kevin Berry is our chief technology officer.

Uh, everything technology, including uh not just information technology but operational technology as well.

You know very well, Director Brian Mason, who's the city's director of the Office of Emergency Management.

He also serves a deputy director in public works, but his responsibilities include emergency management.

He's also responsible for our vast portfolio of facilities across the department, of which there are more than 400, and he's also the executive director of Houston Transstar, which is part of our collaboration with Harris County, Text Dot, and Metro.

And finally, we're so glad to welcome uh Larryus Hassan as the city's chief solid waste officer.

And you know very well what he's responsible for, recycling, heavy trash, regular trash, and many, many complaints, which he handles so well.

Next slide, please.

If you recall last year, we had just uh when we made this budget presentation, we had just gone through the first phase of operational efficiencies and reorganization within the department in FY 2026.

Um we had a focus on reducing both the number of managers with three or fewer direct reports as well as shrinking the management layers within the department.

Uh, at the time, the department spanned more than 13 management layers deep, and we had an initiative to shrink that by nearly half to get it down to seven.

But we also were very focused on ensuring that we had larger teams with managers with more responsibility so that we could accomplish many things.

Uh last year we were able to reduce significantly the number of managers with three or fewer direct reports.

You'll remember in the Ernst and Young assessment, uh, the city had roughly 40 percent, but in public works, that number was closer to 60%.

We shrank that last year down to about 40%, and this year I'm proud to say that we've shrunk that again, and now only about 18% of our managers or supervisors have three or fewer direct reports.

We know that number will never be zero, and that's intentional.

Some of those teams are highly specialized, and it makes sense to be smaller, but we want to make sure that we're very deliberate in how that looks.

We continue to have an operational improvement as we do that.

You'll notice on this particular slide, actually, the total number of managers increased from last year at 679 to 841 this year.

So in other words, we have more operational teams out there, but all of those teams now significantly have more people under them in direct reports.

So that instead of an organization that looks really tall, it looks really, really wide, and that helps us continue to move forward.

Next slide, please.

Highlighting a few additional uh important things that have taken place to note is our 30-day permit pilot, of which many of you are aware.

We started a pilot program within the permitting center to produce residential permits within 30 days.

It's been so successful that's now become a permanent practice.

We were very dedicated on tackling the backlog of water main leaks.

Um the mayor's been very public in documenting how at one point we had more than 1900 active water main breaks at a time.

Today we're closer to 100.

That number, of course, fluctuates on a day-to-day basis.

The infrastructure is in such a condition that it's not uncommon to get 60 or 70 breaks a day.

So we could start this morning at 100 and be at 200 tomorrow, but the important thing is actually that number continues to trend down because we have crews between our internal staff as well as external contractors who tackle it with such alacrity that we're able to move that number in the right direction.

Our goal, of course, is zero.

And more importantly, I want to talk a little bit about workforce replenishment.

Under the voluntary municipal retirement program that was initiated last year, public works uh had about somewhere between four and five hundred employees take advantage of the offer and retire.

It actually meant that as a workforce altogether, the total number of uh active employees in the department was the lowest that it had been in many, many years.

That wasn't necessarily a bad thing, though.

One of the things that when I became director, I identified really quickly as a pain point was that of our 4,000 employees, nearly in a quarter of them, just a quarter, a thousand of them, were administrative uh employees.

For an operational department, that's a big imbalance for us.

We really needed more folks who were focused on the operational side of the house and able to tackle big challenges.