Good evening.

Welcome to the Admin and Finance Committee meeting.

I'd like to start with introductions to my left.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Derek Cahill, District 23.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Mike Dilp, District 24.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman Renee Allen, District 15.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair Nick Roberts, district four.

Thank you, Chairman Andy Nielsen, District 14.

Thank you, Chairman Ms.

Gary, Dan Boots, District 3.

Good evening, Chairman Miss Gary, Krista Carlino, District 11, Far West Side.

Good evening, Maggie Lewis, District 5.

Good evening, Mr.

Chairman, John Barth, representing District 7.

Frank Muscary, District 19.

Start out with we only have one proposal.

Reappoints Ebony Chapel to the Alcoholic Beverage Board American is Ebony here.

Do you have the floor?

Welcome.

How many years have you been on the board?

Um just one term has been served.

One term that gets interesting, I bet.

Tell us why you'd like to be on the board.

Yeah, I would like to be on the board.

I've learned a lot about how to work um closely with people that you know own nightlife spots and other businesses and making sure that they're safe for the community.

That's probably been the biggest you know perk that I've gotten out of being on the board.

So I'm happy to serve another term and continue doing that work.

Any questions from the counselors?

Anyone?

Anyone from the audience?

Go ahead.

I entertained a motion.

I think he has a question.

Well, you had a question.

You raised your hand quicker.

Right.

Hey, I did.

Okay, go for it.

Uh thank you for offering the just curious.

Your term, how long are the terms for your board?

Um, I believe it is a full calendar year.

Okay, got it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, sir.

Councilor Rewiss.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

I move proposal 233 to the full council, but they do pass recommendation.

It's moved and second.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed, none.

Welcome back.

Thank you.

Up next, there's some budget hearings.

First up is Office of Minority and Women Business Development.

You have the floor.

All right.

Welcome.

All right.

Well, good evening, everyone.

Good evening, Mr.

Chair, fellow council uh council members.

Uh thank you once again for allowing us to come back and present uh before you our budget proposal for 2026.

Um before I begin, uh I would be remiss if I didn't uh introduce and acknowledge my staff members, my senior staff members who are joining me here this evening.

Uh senior manager to my right for High Beg.

Uh also have Ava Taylor's our program manager.

Michelle Navnet is a certification officer, also our data analyst, and of course, everybody knows Joe Lee, my compliance officer.

So all right.

So uh agency overview.

Once again, I I won't go through all of this, but the mission of our office is um strives to enhance business growth and economic stability through promotion and c of contracting and procurement opportunities for vendors.

Our objectives are to provide free business consultations and outreach events for all Indiana business owners.

Educate all vendors on projects and bidding opportunities around the city, promote successful procurement opportunities for all subcontractors with city, county, and municipal agencies, and a monitor compliance of public-private partnerships and development projects.

This is just an overview uh of our staff.

Um, as you can see, uh I report to Chief of Staff Dan Parker.

Umneath me is as mentioned before for High Veb, my senior manager.

Grace Julian is our communications coordinator, Ava Taylor, as mentioned before, is our manager of programming and development.

Um the certification team makes up is made up of Michelle Navnet, uh Debbie Racones, Isabella Slagle, Ariana Solana, Ariani Solano, uh, Daniel Jawarde, Angela Ingram, and Joe Lee.

And there's this is just a agency demographic breakdown.

As you can see, the OMWBD team and his workforce we strive to represent and make up the city of Indianapolis and Marion County.

So you can see we have a breakdown of four men on staff, seven women, five racial minorities, and five non-minorities that make up our office for a staff of 11 right now.

So before we go into the programmatic work of our agency, I thought it would be best if we also set a baseline and define what supplier diversity is, what we do.

Supplier diversity is a business strategy that seeks to provide inclusive purchasing practices by engaging small, diverse, and might I add uh local businesses.

Supply diversity is vital for driving innovation, expanding into new markets, and fostering a more equitable business climate.

It's also a meaningful tool for economic growth and job creation.

Our suppliers are only the first step along the supply chain.

All these businesses, all those businesses buy goods and services from their own from other small business and diverse businesses, uh, which stimulates and amplifies growth in the economy.

And last but not least, just want to make you all aware also the fact that all of our contracts are awarded to the lowest responsive and most responsible bidder.

Next, you can see some of our programmatic and fiscal successes.

OMWBD has seen record-breaking increase in certified vendors over the past five years following the implementation of the last business utilization plan update in 2020.

And then also we see this as a result of an increased demand.

The one thing you will notice the gray bar, um, our consultations dropped off in 2024 and 2025, primarily due to being understaffed.

Um we chose to concentrate the staff that we did have on certifications, um, trying to fill those positions, and then also training the new staff that we hired along the way.

Uh being fully staffed though has allowed us to process more applications in a timelier manner and to keep up with demand.

Um, I feel that the increased outreach events that we've done have also helped to create more program awareness.

Some of our other fiscal successes, uh, and some of these quotes you may have seen recently, but Indianapolis has been recognized as one of the 2025 top 25 cities on the rise in the United States by LinkedIn, citing specifically all of the construction projects that we have going on that are driving the city.

According to Yelp Economic Report, Black Business, Black owned businesses grew by 59% in Indianapolis, more than doubling the national average.

According to Axios, we're ranked top top three in the nation for black owned business growth.

And then last but not least, on WBD, uh, like I said, we've reached nearly a thousand community members, um, and we continue to generate positive media coverage with Fox 59, Wish TV, the Indianapolis Recorder, amongst other several other uh local news agency partners.

This is a snapshot of our certification numbers uh through August of 2025.

Um, and as you can see, right at the end of August, we were at 1,112 uh certified vendors.

Uh we had 61 that were pending.

Uh we have done 166 business and bid consultations, uh reviewed 73 bid opportunities, um, our average to either certify or recertify a business.

We got that back down to 76.

Uh normally are it's stated in our um paperwork that that process can take up to 90 days, and so we've gotten that back down to 76 days, and then we've seen uh total of new and recertification applications this year of 242.

We've done 17 site visits, and then we've done two commercial useful function visits.

So as I mentioned before, those visits, the numbers on some of those are down from previous years because, like I said, we had to sort of prioritize what was more important for the office at the time, and with the number of projects and the high demand, and we felt like certification applications getting processed was a little bit of a higher priority.

But we continue to still work in those two areas, and you you know didn't see a drop-off in any of that.

This is just uh pie chart, uh give you an idea of our numbers uh for the different categories that we have, so you can see that.

I won't go through all of that, but minorities, uh women and women that are minorities continue to lead the way for the businesses that we are working with and that we certify.

2024 local business utilization report.

Um, looking at this number in 2024, we had total spend of uh 847 um billion dollars.

Um that number is a little bit less uh for total spend as an as a enterprise than what we had in 2023.

However, the amount of money that we were spending with diverse companies actually increased.

So uh and that's information that you won't see on here, but we can get that information to you after this meeting.

But we did see almost a three percent increase from 2023 to 2024 in the dollars that we spent with diverse businesses, and then to go into just a quick further breakdown of some of those numbers.

The biggest increase was with MBEs.

Um that was almost a three percent increase.

Um we had a very slight increase for WBEs at 0.02 percent.

Um we saw slight decrease for VBEs at 0.37%, um, and then a slight increase for our DOBE's participation at 0.04 percent.

And like I said, we will make sure you guys get the percentages for the 2023 spend that you can compare to this after tonight's meeting.

Community engagement and outreach.

So in 2025, um of the things that we are have done and we will continue to work on.

Um so we had the local business disparity rollout.

Um, as you know, we are in the process of wrapping up the disparity study.

Uh we anticipate that coming out uh sometime actually in the next couple of weeks, and and when that comes out, um, council members will receive copies of that along with the mayor's office, and then we will make it uh public.

Uh but as a part of that process, we will also begin stakeholder meetings that will begin happening in the next couple of weeks, in which we will be gathering information from individuals, organizations to garner their feedback as we have an internal working group that will begin to look at the recommendations, and so we want to give stakeholders the opportunity to give us their feedback that we'll take to that committee.

Then we'll also, like I said, have an opportunity to meet with council members to garner some feedback from you as well, and then that group will work for the probably the next probably six or seven weeks to review those uh recommendations, and then we will return back with recommendate final recommendations to the council and to the mayor before we look at if there's any legislative changes that'll have to occur at the end of the year.

Workshops, um, our office does a phenomenal job of doing uh workshops that we do three annual certification workshops, uh we do one annual good faith effort workshop, and then we do uh 10 workshops on bid submissions.

Um those are critical, especially the last two the good faith effort workshop and the bid submission workshops.

The good faith effort workshop is critical because that is where we get to work with developers, general contractors, other individuals to make sure that they really understand our process of how we want them to try and garner businesses to work on their various projects, how we want that information to be documented, um, how long they have to keep that information.

So we go through a workshop to answer all of those questions to hopefully give everybody sort of a level set on that, and then let them know that we're here as a resource for them anytime their project is going on.

So that workshop is critical.

And then the bid submission workshops are critical because this is where we actually get to work one-on-one with the vendors who often have a lot of questions about how do we submit a bid.

We hear about all these opportunities, but we don't know what to do.

So we do 10 of those annually to work with folks to make sure that they understand that process, and we do that in conjunction with the purchasing department.

So when they come and meet with us, they get answers from everybody that's involved in the process.

Then we also have our vendor of the month campaign, which many of you have participated in.

That is uh a campaign that we started a couple of years ago where we highlight one of our uh diverse vendors every month.

Um we present them with uh certificate from the mayor's office.

We have uh, if available, one of the counselors to come and to present that to them.

But as a part of that process, the MB, the XBE that we cert that we uh promote, they get uh a month's worth of marketing and promotion from our office to help boost and and increase their visibility throughout the community for the whole month.

Uh we've got a wonderful partnership with Wish TV as a part of this project, and so they always do a story on the business and the business owner to talk about what they're doing, how you know the history of their business and everything.

So uh this program has grown tremendously and and so we're just excited to see where it goes in the future.

Um, and we're glad that you uh members of the council are available to participate in that because the business owners really enjoy the fact that you guys are able to come out and recognize them for being in your district.

So let's see.

All right, so then we'll continue as you can see.

Uh community engagement and outreach.

Utilization of B2G now.

Um, so if you remember last year uh as part of our budget for this year, we uh moved to purchase a new software package.

Um that we've got that package purchase.

We are still in the process of getting it fully implemented into our system along with help from ISA and purchasing and some other departments.

Uh, but we are hopeful to be able to launch that uh this fall.

Um this process will take us to being able to uh folks will be able to apply online, and so we will start to make that slow move away from paper applications, uh, but then also it gives us an opportunity to streamline some of our outreach that we do to vendors and everything else.

Um so we're really excited about being able to launch that.

Um those of you who don't know, we have a podcast on the air with OMWBD.

Uh, this is something that we started earlier this summer.

Um I thought, you know, any way that we can communicate with folks, and we know the podcasts are very popular.

Um, so we do we try to do it monthly, sometimes it runs every other month.

But with these podcasts, we basically are just sharing more information about our office.

How do you learn about opportunities?

How do you engage our office?

Uh we talk about upcoming events, whether it's events that we're hosting or events that our community partners are hosting.

So uh we started this process.

We're getting some good feedback on it.

Uh we know folks are listening to us, so we're gonna hopefully continue to try and grow that um over the next uh coming years and and hopefully we'll continue to help us out.

Um pre-bid meetings, as mentioned before.

We attend and participate in pre-bid meetings to make sure that folks who are coming to those meetings know that we're engaged, we're there to answer questions to assist them with connecting and networking so that they get involved and get access to these opportunities.

And then, of course, we have our flagship events uh that we host ourselves.

Um that would include so now we sort of have in our rotation.

We do a huge networking event out at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in May.

Um, of course, we have our participation with the Indianapolis Black Expo and the Mayor's uh breakfast and the business conference that we participate in every year.

We just held uh last week our reverse trade show in conjunction with the Indianapolis Airport Authority, which was a huge success over at Martin University, where we had well over 200 folks come out and engage with various businesses and departments here within city government.

And then we wrap up the year with the mayor's year-in forum, which is always usually the first week in December.

That event is one where we bring business owners back together, give them an opportunity to ask questions and learn and talk about some of the things that have occurred over the past 12 months, but more importantly, we try to give them an opportunity to get a snapshot of what's coming down the pike for the next 12 months.

So that event wraps up the year for us, but those are our flagship events.

Um and Ava Taylor, our program manager for those to make sure that those are tight and that we have good success with those.

So those are uh doing well for us.

Goals and priorities for 2026, as mentioned before, transition in the B2G.

That that is gonna be uh huge for us because like I said, I think that will help to eliminate um further disparities that diverse businesses are seeing.

Uh we will hopefully make the process a little bit smoother and easier for those businesses to certify and to recertify with our office and for us to be able to get information out to them.

So uh that is a top priority, and then the release and implementation of the 2025 uh disparity study is also uh critical for us at this time.

Uh we want to go through that uh look at those recommended changes, see what makes sense for our agency and for the city.

Um bring those back to you so that you will have the opportunity to uh have conversations with the mayor's office, and then we can make a determination of what what works best, what makes sense for us to move forward.

So I said those are our two of our larger priorities.

Last but not least, we want to continue our staff training.

Um as I mentioned earlier, we are fully staffed right now, um, but we do have some new staff members, so we want to continue our training process, make sure that we're staying abreast of all of the changes that are happening locally, uh state level, federal level, uh, and so that you know we're able to provide the best services we can for the citizens of Indianapolis.

We also want to increase our participation with our partners out in the community.

Um I think we've done a great job so far, but I think we can go even further.

There's still certain sectors, certain areas of the city that I think we still could do a better job of connecting with.

So we're gonna be making um outreach efforts into uh the Burmese community and Senator Kate.

I mean Council Cahill has helped me out with that, and other communities that are merging here in Indianapolis.

We want to make sure that they're aware of the services we provide and what we can try to assist them with.

So uh increasing our visibility is gonna be key for us in doing that.

And some of this we know we can't do all of ourselves.

Uh we are, as I mentioned, a small staff.

Uh so we're gonna be leaning on creating even deeper relationships with some of our community partners to help out with some of the some of the priorities that we have.

All right, so budget breakdown.

Um, as you can see, there's a variance uh 193,451 dollars.

Um, we we're going to pivot uh in some of the things that we do so that folks do not see a drop off in any of our services.

Um as I mentioned earlier, we're gonna lean more on our community partners to help deliver some of the services that we know small and diverse businesses need.

Um we will also work to delegate some of the consulting services that we currently provide to some of our community partners as well so that we make sure that folks are still getting the assistance that they need.

Character one, like I said, not a huge drop in that line item.

Character two, same character three, uh so the difference that you are seeing here.

Um this is a as a result of um ISA chargebacks.

Um, but then also the larger part of this comes from the fact as I mentioned earlier, we're dropping the current software package that we do currently use in lieu of the B to G software package as it is more effective, but it's also more economical for our office as well.

So that's why you see the the difference there in line item three.

Character four, no significant change.

Character five, that's just a decrease corporation council allocation.

And then last but not least, if you have any questions, I'm more than happy to try and answer any of those now.

If not, there's our contact information, and we'll be more than happy to follow up with any questions that anybody has.

Council.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Uh and thank you.

Uh nice uh very detailed presentation, Director.

I appreciate it.

Uh thank you for uh the work you mentioned with the uh the Burmese community.

I I appreciate that.

Umly real question, I'm just curious how this worked out.

You you said you were fully staffed, um and I don't know if I don't think that was the case all of 2025 and if that's so how with a COA of 2.6 and health insurance going up, did you pull off?

And I it it it doesn't matter that it's a small number.

How did you pull off a negative number at all?

I'm curious.

I'm just curious on character one.

Yeah, so unfortunately, counselor, that is a a question that uh OFM would need to help us out with.

Um all I know is we were pulled to make sure that we had some slight reductions in our budget as as you know everyone else was, um, but that was one area where like I said, we we knew we needed to be fully staffed in order to to do the work that we needed to do.

So um I'd be more than happy to try and get that explanation for you, and we'll get that forwarded to you.

Thank you.

I'm just like I said, thank you.

But I'm I'm just really curious how you get a character one reduction with everyone getting raises, everyone getting health insurance goes up, and you're fully stopped.

I mean, that's we don't we don't usually get to have have our cake and either too.

So that was nice to see.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Leader Lewis.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Thank you for your presentation and congratulations on all of your success.

A couple questions if that's okay, Mr.

Chairman.

Absolutely.

So you talked about the increases uh with your vendors, but there was decrease in the BBE.

Can you talk to us a little bit more about that decrease and why you think that's taking place?

So councilwoman, I think part of it is uh one, we don't have uh very many uh VBEs that are certified with us, and and the ones that we do have are certified in I would say probably two or three sectors.

Um in 2023 and going into 2024, just as I think we were starting to see the uptick in construction projects and things like that around the city, um, a lot of those firms that are construction-based BBEs had not been contracted yet on some of these projects.

I think when we see the numbers for next year, you're gonna see a substantial increase in the amount of spend that we have with BBEs because they've been contracted on projects that started end of 2024 going into 2025.

Perfect.

Thank you for that.

And then my last question, uh I know we've had lots of conversations about this, but what are the consequences if a contractor doesn't meet those diversity uh goals so um it it really sort of it will let me back up?

It depends, it starts with with their uh their good faith effort process.

If if they have put together uh a good faith effort plan that has been followed and working in concert with our office to try and engage diverse businesses at every opportunity that they could through the life of a project, um when they don't meet their goals and we have that plan, um, then we normally would have to accept the fact that they made a good faith effort.

They documented all of the things that they tried to do in terms of engaging folks, doing outreach meetings and things of that nature.

Um on the other foot, when there is not uh a good faith effort in place, and or we we sign off on one and they still don't meet it, and the good faith effort steps are not followed as well.

Um we do have the options of um withholding payments.

Um in some instances, I don't think it's happened since I've been here, but um possibly debarring uh a company from being uh certified or being able to work on city projects for a certain period of time.

Um but our goal is to try and work with folks to to prevent getting to that point.

So we are we are really emphasizing right now to business owners, developers, contractors, whoever, as soon as they have it in their mind that they they want to do a project and it's gonna need city assistance.

So we are we are really emphasizing right now to business owners, developers, contractors, whoever, as soon as they have it in their mind that they they want to do a project and it's gonna need city assistance when they have that conversation with DMD or the mayor's office, whoever else, as soon as they have those conversations, we want them to come have a conversation with us because we know that they're gonna have to be engaged with our office.

We know that our diversity goals are gonna probably be attached to the project.

Let us work with you, let us educate you on the process and keep you from getting in trouble in the long run.

Perfect.

Thank you.

Thank you for your leadership.

Thank you.

Any other counselors, Counselor Boots.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Thank you, Director Fredericks, for your presentation.

Just a quick couple questions.

Can you the 2025 disparity study?

Yes, can you give us just a brief recitation of the scope and intent of the study?

So the study looks at the um spending from 2020 or 2020.

Uh 2018.

No, 2019.

2019 through 2024.

So it will look at uh city dollars spent.

Um it will also uh look at usage of diverse businesses and all of our sort of major areas of spend, whether it's construction, professional services, um, what are some of the other areas?

Um also looking at public private partnerships, yeah, public private partnerships.

Uh procurement practices, what barriers small businesses face in the local um in the local marketplace and the legal framework for the program.

Yeah.

So it it this is like I said, this is basically a five-year snapshot of how the city has performed when it comes to doing business with diverse businesses, what our spend looks like.

Um, but then more importantly, like I say, we'll also the consultant that we have hired will give us a behemoth amount of recommendations, none of which we're obligated to to abide by or except.

So that's where we have our internal working group that will go through those recommendations.

We will look and see, you know, which ones make sense for us, which ones don't, and then hopefully have them hash out uh through meetings and discussions, you know, what what makes viable sense for us, and then turn around, like I said, and bring those back to the council and to the mayor's office to determine which direction we want to go forward.

Great.

And final question.

Uh, in spite of the title of your department, the services you offer are open to all businesses, are they not?

Yes, sir.

Anyone so anybody that needs some consulting or bid practice information, any you don't have to be a woman-owned, minority-owned, disabled, what have you.

Anyone can come to your department for it.

Yes, sir.

Anybody that walks in our door, um, their business is in Indianapolis, uh, Central Indiana, we will assist them with with any of the services we provide.

Great.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Thank you.

Any other comments or questions?

Seeing anyone anyone from the audience?

Seeing none, we'll see you at the review analysis.

Thank you.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you all.

Up next is the Office of Corporation Council.

Welcome.

Good evening.

Uh thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Thank you, uh, committee members.

Uh my name is Brandon Bieler.

I serve as the corporation council, and I'm here to present the 2026 proposed budget for the Office of Corporation Council.

Um, the Office of Corporation Council is the embedded law firm within the city county.

Uh, we are charged with representing city county agencies and employees, uh providing them legal counsel and advice.

OCC administration manages the office's daily functions, which contains senior leadership and administrative staff.

Our office is comprised of three principal divisions for litigation division, the counseling division, and the office of the city prosecutor.

And I'll get into those a little bit further in the presentation.

Uh in addition, OCC also administers the Office of Equal Opportunity.

This is a snapshot of current OCC staff and our organizational chart.

The first three lines are members of OCC's senior staff.

And while they're here today, I should honor them and thank them for all their work of work throughout the year because it really is a team effort.

So that would be Julie Slaughter, who serves as the deputy corporation counsel, Katie Campbell, who serves as the city prosecutor, Ellen Gabovich, who serves as chief counsel, Kylie Keysler, who serves as a chief litigation counsel, and Jamie Stout, who serves as our office project manager.

Again, it really certainly takes a team to keep the office running and to continue to provide high quality legal services to our city county clients.

And I very much appreciate all they do.

And I should also note they are our senior leadership team is comprised of 80% women.

Going through the three principal divisions, the litigation team manages a large docket of lawsuits to which the city county county agencies or its employees are named as parties.

Last year, a total of 93 cases were filed against the city county or employees.

We were able to resolve 131 of those cases.

This year to date, you'll see an uptick in that.

There have been 110 cases filed against the city county, and we've resolved 81 of those cases, or not of those cases, but of cases total.

The counseling division provides full service legal support to city county agencies as well as the 26 boards and commissions.

The counseling attorneys sort of serve as the in-house attorneys for each agency.

Each agency is assigned an attorney.

So that attorney is generally the principal legal contact for agencies when they have legal questions or want to consult our office about something.

The Office of City Prosecutor is responsible for prosecuting ordinance violations.

Last year, the city prosecutor's office filed 811 cases resolving 1,012 cases or closing, I should say, 1,012 cases.

This year to date, they've filed the Office of City Prosecutor has filed 671 cases and closed out 579.

Looking a little bit into agency staffing.

OCC is a law firm comprised of 45 total positions.

We currently have 36 filled, which is an uptick from last year, which we're really happy about.

We still do have nine vacancies.

One of the biggest focus of our senior staff is to make sure we support our staff and focus on retention.

Here are some things we do and we can plan to continue to do in 2026.

We do pay attorneys annual licensing fees.

In addition to that, for most of the litigation section, if they're not already admitted for practice in the district, the federal district courts, Seventh Circuit, or even the United States Supreme Court, should that be necessary, we would pay for those admissions as well.

So attorneys don't have to worry about paying that out of pocket.

We also retain we also reimburse our support staff to maintain credentials.

Easiest example of this would be several of our paralegals or notary publics.

That serves all city county employment people, and obviously we have to notarize several things, so we will pay for paralegal to maintain his or her notary public credential.

Something we started last year that's been really positively received by our attorneys is we give each attorney a each attorney a $500 bank that they can use when they find professional uh professional development or continuing legal education opportunities.

I'll talk about on this later.

We don't have a lot in-house that we offer, so in order to help not only attorneys maintain their licenses with their continuing legal education, we kind of let them pick and choose what programs are beneficial to them, and they just have to clear it, and they should have $500 a year they can use on those programs.

We also provide each attorney with membership to the International Municipal Lawyers Association, which that helps connect them to a network of municipal lawyers doing similar work.

Um also that also offers programming specific to the work that they do here for the city county.

Um and finally, we have done, especially in the litigation section, engaging in some internal education programs that we want to help do more of next year, particularly working with IMPD since there's been such an uptick in federal cases involving civil rights with uh police involvement and trying to focus on that to know where the law stands in the Seventh Circuit and also to help our our attorneys learn from local attorneys who are experts in this area and getting some are continuing to provide uh those services for IMPD and any other law enforcement agencies.

Um programmatic and fiscal successes.

Um I'll talk again about staffing increases and even just a few attorneys really does make a difference to our office on the capacity we have to take on cases.

So that would be particularly the litigation section.

Um more attorneys means there's more capacity.

Uh in the counseling section, we hired this year a deputy chief counsel that's gonna focus on public records requests, so that'll help streamline those, and now that's a person that each agency knows to contact when they get a public records request and how to process that and how to and what's disclosable, what's not, and all that and all that.

Finally, for the office city prosecutor, we hired a deputy city prosecutor and now have that team with full staff leadership.

Again, I'm always on retention, which for this I want to thank HR and OFM.

We've been able to utilize our internal advancement system, which has really helped keep people who've been with the city county who do good work with us and the attorney and as attorneys to feel advancement in the office.

We've been able to give internal promotions, which I think is really helped with morale and also helped with developing leaders and leadership in our office.

And just the benefit of this that we've that I've heard from several agency leaders.

There, since we have less turnover and we've been able to maintain our staff, the agencies feel like they know their attorneys now, they're more comfortable reaching out and helps us keep the loop and jump in front of any potential liability issues because they're just a better working relationship and knowledge of who people are.

So this slide's community impact.

Um I changed it a bit because we just to be clear are an inward-facing organ entity agency.

We are not an outward facing agency.

We provide support to the city county and its employees.

So here are some of the things that we've done though to impact and positively impact the community.

We are navigating as plaintiffs and the opioid litigation, which are several cases going on.

Um right now, the settlement funds we've received are 16 million dollars.

And in checking with OFM, I think the projected revenue from the opioid funds will be 71 million dollars by the end of it.

There's been some slow, I won't get into the news of it all.

You may have all seen this in the news, but something that slowed it down is the stackler bankruptcy was rejected by the courts, so we've had to kind of go back and wait for that to get all worked out.

We just recently, as of last week, signed off on that, so hopefully we'll see some movement with that soon.

Uh, in addition, you all may remember from the news a few years ago the Kia Hyundai break ins due to a manufacturing defect.

Uh, we did enter as plaintiffs in that class action.

Uh a special shout out to Julie Slaughter, our deputy corporation counsel, and IMPD, who are tasked with providing a ton of information in a very quick amount of time so we could keep that case going with unredacted and redacted police reports.

While a lot of work has gone into that, this is very early in the litigation.

We are only in phase two of discovery, so I anticipate that going on for um at least the next year or so.

Uh mitigating liability.

That's something again, OCC is not a policy making agency.

What we do is we provide guidance and legal support to agent to agencies that do make policy.

So again, working with them more closely and making sure again, not only legal compliance, but compliance with our ordinance and compliance with our rules.

Um and finally, a unique challenge that's been part of this year is keeping monitoring all the changes to the federal and state policies that have gone on since uh January of this year.

So our office has been charged with monitoring these changes uh that are occurring, and we want to and we try to flag the ones that we think could possibly impact the city or county.

And our goal is to work with them to make sure the city county remains compliant so we can risk any minimize liability.

I know I keep saying it, but 2026, which has been such a positive thing to have a retention of staff, so that's something that we focus on again, keeping our staff supported and that they feel fulfilled in the jobs they're doing and the important work they're doing for the city county, even though again we are an internal agency.

Um the special assistant United States Attorneys program is something you all may recall.

Council appropriated funds for this a few years ago.

Um it's a program that is funded, it's their character one employees in our budget, but they're housed at the U.S.

Attorney's Office.

Um, three positions were on there.

We've hired one who's had some phenomenal success and has been very, very good over there.

The other two, I for lawyers may know this, but the U.S.

attorney's office certainly requires a high caliber of attorneys, so we've had some trouble to find some of those.

And then this year we got notice from the US Attorney's Office with the change of leadership and with the federal administration coming in that there was a hiring freeze, and that included these positions too, so we've kind of put those on hold.

But the good news of that is you all may know that a new U.S.

attorney has been appointed.

We've been in contact, and we plan in the next few weeks to meet to start the process again of trying to hire those other two positions because again, this is a crime reduction.

This is the prosecuting violent crime in Marion County at the federal level.

Um we also next year want to use character three to provide in-house professional development training opportunities.

We reached out to a few speakers on that.

Um and finally, just to have some stronger engagement with our small locally owned law firms uh for our professional services.

Uh, this is the snapshot of our budget.

We'll go through each character kind of briefly, and I'll explain what we what we utilize those funds for.

Um, but this is just the summary slide.

Uh with character one, you will see we do have a variance.

While it does include the cost of living adjustment of 2.6% and uh the health insurance increase of 5.6% this is where we focused on our reserves for 2026.

We working closely with OFM on this were able to identify a few positions that we were comfortable holding off on hiring until 2027.

And so that is part of the reason for that variance as well.

Character two supplies that didn't say change from 2025.

And then in our character three in addition to what I know what other agencies have said about ISA chargebacks and other chargebacks this also is an accounted for it in it's from an increase in our uncontrolled character three.

The way that OCC I guess to think about how OCC is handles character three, these are what monies we use to operate a law firm.

So in addition to the professional services contracts this is what we use to hire experts for summary judgment experts for trial deposition testimony transcript cost records for court of appeals uh mediation cost so this is really just everything that a law firm does comes out of character three for us um character four this we do have an increase here because uh lawyers may know or those who know lawyers may know is that technology for law for the legal community has just grown so we're hoping to use some of these funds to help modernize and got provide some out of adequate technology for um a modern law firm uh finally this is the character five this is our charges our chargebacks looks like our chargebacks um have increased from last year and with a variance of 269 thousand 304 dollars if that's questions thank you for your presentation thank you chair counselor Roberts thank you Mr Chair and thank you Mr.

Beeler um one thing that was top of mind for me just coincidentally for the day I got an email from a constituent who had a pothole on Fall Creek Road and uh ironically that's probably one of the most public facing um you know responsibilities of I believe your agency what's the process for that you know they sent all the information everything and they were declined for it what's the process for filing a claim for that thank you yes great great great question I think so there's a process you go online you get the form we accept hand we accept forms if they want to bring them to the office people can fill them out there.

So under the state law for state or local governments um someone has to file a tort claim every tort we have a dedicated tort claim investigator who actually I believe is a trained paralegal who investigates every tort claim that comes in to our office our process is typically if we need additional documentation because the goal is to make the person whole and if if we find ourselves liable I guess the first question is are we liable do we find liability so we will have to typically reach out to that person or if they're represented by counsel or that our investigator reach out to their attorney and say hey we need medical bills or your tire bill whatever it is because we have to verify what the cost is and then do an internal investigation as to various factors is for pothole specifically how long do we know how the pot hole is it in the time frame where we don't have liability or do we have liability it's all just a matter of law but everything is investigated and to a degree when we find that we may in fact be liable we always offer a settlement we always offer to settle and make the person whole and that's really the process for it.

It's uh we have 90 days from the when we get the tort claim to to uh by state law it's deemed denied after 90 days so that's the time frame she works in to communicate with the claimant uh or whoever else is involved to fully investigate it and make a determination councillor Nielsen thank you Mr.

Chairman I just have two uh quick questions um counselor beeler thank you I feel like I may have asked this last year so I do app I do apologize but um when you were discussing the special assistant U.S.

attorney program it it jolted a memory I think it was in the previous term um that there was money that was appropriated to evaluate um what possible actions we'd have against out of state landlords there was uh not to put you on the spot on that but uh I feel like it was something that the the council I think the council appropriated this in the previous term um but I just wanted to put that out there because I'd I'd love to if if it sounded like there was some monies appropriated to do some further analysis and I know this is something that you understand very well in your in your in your previous uh uh legal career so um I just wanted to I would love to get a hold of that information just to see what you all um were able to find because as as we've seen other municipalities explore um creative ways to address this issue I think it's something we still need to be mindful of the second piece was on the uh real quick on the Hyundai Kia um uh lawsuit I was probably not saying the words right but um has anyone settled it kind of like on a broad base where is that I know it it's happening around the country can you kind of characterize where the city is at in relation to other municipalities etc.

I was probably not saying the words right, but um, has anyone settled it kind of like on a broad base?

Where is that?

I know it it's happening around the country.

Can you kind of characterize where the city is at in relation to other municipalities, etc.?

Sure.

Thank you.

We yeah, thank you, counselor.

We are in the same boat.

There's one class action lawsuit that all the municipalities are in.

We just got in that, I believe earlier this year, possibly late last year.

Um when I referenced IMPD and and deputy counsel deputy corporate council council slaughter, um we were selected as one of the cities that they wanted to get some initiative data from to see how the case was going, so that's why they got a very short order to provide like over a thousand some odd, maybe a couple hundred thousand police reports, and not only we had to work through those for privacy concerns and things like that.

It was a big task to help keep kind of the case alive.

Actually, one jurisdiction at least, maybe two bowed out because it was too hard of a work, it was too hard of a reach for them to do.

We were motivated to not be in that situation.

So they got that done, and now we're in f so everyone's just in phase two of discovery of this case.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

And leader Lewis.

Oh no.

Council Barrett.

Thank you.

A couple questions.

Um how FTEs that you haven't had filled.

How has that Delta gotten shorter over time?

Like did you have a over the time you've only been here like two years, right?

But in the time, can you look back and see how much change have you had you've narrowed that down considerably and how much?

Yes.

I so I came in the city like God, 22, whenever that was.

Um so, yes, I came in when the litigation section had kind of had a lot of turnover, and I was like one of three litigators, and that was very challenging.

We now we're not fully stopping litigation, but that's the positions we kept open because that's the ones that we had to do a lot of outside work because we just did not have attorneys to litigate cases.

Um so that's been a huge positive increase.

Overall, we are up from last year.

I've been in this role since sometime last year.

Um, and we've had consistent increases, including getting all leaderships, each division is now uh I believe fully staffed on leadership, which has also helped just kind of streamline just the administration of the work that comes into each section.

So, yes, we've seen increases with that.

And then one more question request.

So um on the uh the uh support we're providing for the federal prosecutors.

What my recollection, so two facts.

One um my recollection is part of the uh reason we did that was to help with using federal charges and federal resources to get guns off the street, right?

And I've noticed that one of the few times I'll say something positive about the Trump administration is that they've been wildly successful in their takeover of the DC um uh public safety um universe, and that they have focused on getting guns off the street.

They've been relentless in getting guns on the street, and then in the last week or so, they've gotten over 200 guns off the street.

So are we seeing anything like that, or are we seeing any kind of results like that um since our president is setting the stage that it's appropriate to take guns off the street?

Are we gonna continue to go with that that approach?

I've I've never practiced criminal law, so I can't speak much to it.

But what I can say is that what has been since I've been practicing, and I started in the federal courts, um uh this you this office here in Indianapolis in the Southern District has been really vigorous about um prosecuting felon and possession cases that is unique to our district.

So that work has continued, and I I mean, as I understand that is the focus here again, these SAWSA positions, because the Southern District goes all the way down to Evansville, these are positions that are dedicated to have the time and resources in Marion County Councillor.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Uh we've we've talked with this particular issue with uh BNS.

Uh but I I wanted to get your sort of unique perspective that a number of counselors, and I think BNS agrees with this.

When OCP goes to uh court regarding zoning violations, things like that, it is very common in my experience.

I think it's more common than not, where they go in, they don't have enough time in the court, and there's continuance after continuance after continuance, regardless of how sort of egregious or not moving towards a solution.

And I enjoyed uh counselor boots' comment that we uh we whip people with a a uh wet noodle here.

And I would and I would say that that's what I hear quite a bit about.

So to that end, uh I guess one, would you agree if and uh I don't know if you can answer that, or and two, what is there anything you can offer that this council could do to help move the needle on that problem?

How we can get more court time to get a hearing so that we don't just have a continuance and one more month of flagrant non-compliance.

Thank you.

Yeah, you certainly have identified uh an issue, and I know Katie here, our city prosecutor hasn't played that even this year, and I think as of recently, our court time for ordinance cases has gone down a whole day.

Um so that certainly is a problem.

I think the the basic basis of where we start this from is remembering that the goal of ordinance court is compliance, not punishment.

So I think that and there's only so much we can do of controlling the courts.

I mean, we all follow what the judges say to do, that's what we have to do.

Um I'm not a policy person, I can't I can't, but I'm happy to have that discussion.

I know Katie would be eager to have that discussion as well.

Thank you.

Yeah, I it I I guess my view is I just think both parties deserve their day.

And I and I agree with with your sentiment that compliance is the the issue.

I I really don't have a problem when people come into compliance and avoid court.

I'm I'm all for that.

I want compliance.

The issue is when somebody comes in and they've done absolutely nothing, sometimes sometimes and frequently made it worse, uh, and then come in and still get a continuance and stuff.

Can I have I have cases in my district that have gone on for three years now?

Um, and it's just continuance, continuance, continuance.

So those are the types of things, and once that reputation is out there, then I I see more people just not comply because nothing happened.

So thank you.

Thank you for that.

Thank you.

Counselor Boots.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Thank you, Counselor Bieler.

And just to follow up on Counselor Kay Hills, I too have serious concerns about the speed at which OCP prosecutes cases.

Um nothing irks our residents and constituents more when they bring a blatant zoning issue to us.

We're found in violation, and then a year and a half later they haven't done a thing.

And then the neighbors see that and they go, Well, I can put a fence right up against the street.

They didn't do anything about it.

And that seems to be happening more frequently now.

So I would just encourage you to you know do what you guys can to speed up that process because that really feeds into the public's view that the government's whipping people with wet noodles.

So I would really encourage you to spend some time focusing on that issue.

Absolutely.

Counselor, um, here's quite uh the uh fines.

Who controls how much the fines are?

Us or the state?

Um it's a little tricky.

So we certain agencies have their fines you know prescribed in in the ordinance.

We don't.

We do control them, but to a degree of the court ultimately controls them.

So we learn uh through enforcing them what the court how far the court will allow.

So that really is incumbent on the court.

Okay, thank you.

Because we can go with a full max, and we likely will never get that.

One more.

Sorry, Councilor.

While we're while we're here, uh, and I and I certainly have not delved into uh the unigov unique things in a first-class city.

Other cities in Indiana have a like a mayor's court or municipal court.

Is that for for these types of things instead of having to go to the county uh court?

Is that a possibility to your knowledge, or do you do you know?

Could could we have an um city of Indianapolis court to avoid that?

Could we just create our own court?

Is that a possibility?

What I know, and that is certainly an area I could research more.

I know that the executive committee at the Marion County Superior Court has the authority to create what's called problem-solving courts.

Um I don't know the details of what if that would be within it, but that's something that's one area to look in.

So I think that's something to see what the court's jurisdictions are on creating separate courts like that.

I mean, I think even talking about whether the township small claims court should be operating a different way as well.

Now, again, that's dictated through state law.

But I think that's that's my understanding of that as seeing whether courts can do, but I can look into seeing if that's a possibility, and that would be right dictated by ordinance.

Yeah, I just I would be, I guess I would be curious because I do see that.

I think Fisher's has a uh municipal court, and they're not beholden to Hamilton County Superior Court.

Um we've never done it.

I don't know if we're prohibited because we're uniquely a first class city, but if not, maybe it's time to investigate that.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Anyone else from council?

Well, anyone from the audience seeing that we'll see in a review analysis.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Up next is uh ISA back.

You understand what it was for?

Not for the PC takeover.

All right.

Welcome.

You guys did a great job with this.

It's all really problems have been ironed out.

So one year later, it's good to go.

Good.

Thank you.

You have the floor.

Well, thank you, Mr.

Chair and Counselors of the Committee.

Appreciate the time to present our budget for 2026.

With this presentation, I kind of took the liberty to go a different way.

In the past, ISA hasn't been very forthcoming of how it is that we do work.

So as we explain who we are, we're also going to explain how we do work and how we measure that and what that looks like for the city county.

And what I hope will be to show the value that you will see from our budget as we move through that process, and then we'll end with more with our community outreach and our successes and what it looks like for 2026.

So with me with my executive leadership team, we have Kevin Moore, who's our chief operating officer, Nicole Heatley Holmes, our chief information security officer, and Kate Coten, our chief digital officer.

Kai Davis is not here today, but we do have Ken Montgomery from Channel 16 and Janelle Bunton, our strategic comms manager.

As we look at how ISA is structured, the admin in finance uh rolls out to our CFO Kai Davis.

Business services, which is our relationship arm, how we interact with the departments and agencies of the city county currently rolls up through me.

Infrastructure services, think of that as network, uh data center support desk, field services, uh, who you call when if you if there's an issue, that all rolls up through Kevin Moore, uh, our chief operations officer, and then application services and channel 16 uh roll up through Kate COTON, and then security services rolls up through Nicole Heatley Homes.

And I apologize to all of them for putting their pictures on there, but I thought it was a little nicer than a Nord chart.

Um as far as our staffing, ISA has 52 full-time positions, uh, one part-time, 46 of those are filled, six are vacant currently, and that is by design.

Uh so for uh for for budget means and and for trying to design and figure out what's what's best for the city county overall.

ISA is buoyed by two managed service providers, Daniels and Associates is our application service provider, and Bell Tech Logics is our data center networking and support desk uh and such service provider.

Uh they add about a hundred FTEs to our team for a grand total of around 150.

Uh like I mentioned earlier, we had very little unintentional vacancy over this past year.

Uh, we in we promoted one person into an executive position that was a new position, the chief digital officer, and that's Kate Coten.

Uh, and then we backfilled her role externally.

Um, as far as education for our team, we we rely on a couple different things.

For the last several years, we've been using a product to called Stormwinds that would make available to the ISA team and uh the technology training domains, whether it's security, whether it's uh networking, whether it's help desk, they're all all different domains within within IT training was available within that product.

Uh additionally, earlier this year we partnered with Innovate Us, which is uh has provided AI training for the entire enterprise as far as public service professionals with that kind of scope.

Uh, they also offer uh legal public sector professional training as well.

It's been very beneficial and a great partnership for that.

Through that partnership, we've also were able to offer uh a batch of 150 Google certificates, uh 150 people to get Google certificates and business analysis, uh cybersecurity and project management.

As we open that up to the enterprise uh for that training, that was filled within an hour just to show you the demand that that was there for that level of training.

Um we we certainly foster upskilling through additional means uh where people find that they have a need, we're willing to support professional development with as far as certified certifications or outside training.

Um of the things that I I think is important from an IT industry uh perspective is customer satisfaction.

The acronym there is CSAT, that's what's up there.

Uh, generally speaking, when you look at an organization and there's customer satisfaction, particularly an IT support desk or service type of role, you're looking at around 70 percent, uh 75% is your your industry average for customer satisfaction.

Currently, for the last several years, really for about the last six.

Uh it has been in the high 90s.

Lately, it's been at 98%, which is an amazing testament to the amount of work that my team does, uh, and our by extension the uh managed service providers as well.

You can see what that trending looks like.

Each of those ratings, you'll see that there are surveys and response rating uh percent sent and responded to uh after every ticket that we send out, there's an opportunity to pick on a smiley face and rate rate what your level of satisfaction was with the resolution.

Uh after every ticket that we send out, there's an opportunity to pick on a smiley face and rate rate what your level of satisfaction was with the resolution.

As you can see, I'm not hiding anything.

You can see the very unsatisfied up there and the unsatisfied.

Uh looking at our service desk tickets, just so you understand what we look at day in and day out.

You can see by quarter and by year, at least going back into 2024, uh, the number of tickets that have been submitted for those time frames.

I will have to describe and kind of dive deep into defining what an incident is, what a tag uh task is, uh, change requests and problem management.

I won't make it very long.

I I don't mean to talk down, but I just want to make sure that we understand what it is.

Uh, from an incident standpoint, that is something that occurs outside of band.

Uh, your computer stops working at blue screens, your phone's not working, those types of things, those are when people would engage with us to get that fixed because it was unexpected.

Uh for a catalog task, that is something that we know and have fulfilled before.

So someone needs a laptop, someone needs a phone, someone needs an application, that would be a task that we're we're we're going to do.

We understand how to how to fulfill those tasks, whereas an incident it may be something that we have to figure out to solve.

Uh a change request, uh, the city county has a complex technical uh tech.

We have a technology framework of networks and systems and applications, and the goal of that is to keep it up for as as long as possible and without any interruption.

And to do that, what we have is a is a change advisory board where if someone wants to make a change, they want to update an application, they want to change the way a network is routed, they want to add uh a hub or not hubs, a bad word, but that's just a terrible example that I'll continue to use.

You have to put in a request in order to get that done.

And we need to make sure that it's not going to interfere with the day-to-day operations of the city-county 24-735.

So that is a that will go through that process.

Everyone will make sure that it technically works, that it doesn't impact the business, doesn't impact uh the public uh uh in in a way that is unexpected or uh uh unacceptable, and then we uh accept that, and then that change occurs over time.

And so you can see the number of requests over time that that has happened.

And then finally, problem management.

Problem management's pretty simple in explaining.

So uh counselor Cahill, Counselor Roberts, Council Nielsen have like a similar problem where their email isn't working, we start to notice a larger problem.

We group all those tickets together and we solve them together.

And then once we solve one of those, it solves all those problems.

On your right hand side, uh you can see the different ways that we can bring in incidents.

There's automated, uh, those are simply uh we have monitoring tools in place.

If a fire station goes down for networking or for power, we're gonna get notified.

And so those are the type of type of tickets that you'll see there.

There's chat that's someone speaking with a live chat to a person.

There's phone calls, and then there's self-service, which is kind of an automated walkthrough on a phone to fix an issue, reset a password, that type of thing.

And then finally, on floor nine, we have a tech cafe that is open during business hours, and anyone who is within the city county can walk in there and get their uh issue hopefully resolved quickly.

Finally, I think this is the last type of ticket that we have is major incident response.

Uh, something that started, I think in 2019 was a the ability to we rate certain things as critical.

So uh the network being up is a critical, the network itself is a critical thing.

If for every reason that it went down, that would be a critical incident.

Some locations, fire stations, um, some parks, uh, different networks, uh different services are rated as critical, and if they're down that could impact public safety, service to the residents, things things like that where we would want to bring everybody together as quickly as possible on a bridge to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

So these are the amount of major incidents that we've had uh over what frankly is the last the better part of the last two years.

You'll notice that there is a big spike in quarter two of 2025 with the network issue.

That was related to storms.

We had a lot of fire stations and parks, uh, disconnect from the network and reconnect where or we had to wait a little while to get those restored.

We'll talk more about storms later, but that that's something that we respond to and try and get up and running as quickly as possible so that a service critical services are restored to whatever department or agency where the public has needed.

Umside of that, that's just our tickets and responding to to requests.

Uh, we mentioned earlier our our interactions with our customers and what that brings on.

There are projects that we bring in from departments and agencies where they have a new application that they want, they have to want to change the technology that they're using, or maybe we internally know that we have to upgrade an application to to something else.

So, this is a screenshot of our project tracker from last week.

Uh, this project tracker has over 844 projects counted in this.

We've only had this going for about two years.

Uh, in the last when I took the picture, there were uh two weeks of data.

Uh and within the last two weeks, there was a 108 active projects.

And if you can recall, we have 150 people.

So just to understand what that looks like on top of the tickets.

Um those projects are rated by priority and are worked on as as as quickly as possible.

Uh delving a little deeper into projects, these are some business as usual.

That's that BAU that you see up there.

Projects from moving buildings, uh, doing a Windows 10 deployment, Windows 11 deployment, IMPD laptops for patrol cars and the configuration they're in, um, Wi-Fi deployments and upgrades, uh, the HVAC floor moves that building authorities doing to upgrade the HVAC.

Like, we are helping in all of those projects that are going on.

Uh when you go to the applications projects and look at what that's like.

Uh building and neighborhood services moved their their SAS uh a CLA last year.

Uh, whenever we change benefit partners, uh, we have to change people soft.

And so that's a project that we would be working on and affects what we're doing.

Um when it I mean uh basically every application within the enterprise, if someone wants to touch it, we have to do work on it.

Um, how we measure our our partners uh and us are by SLA server level service level agreements or service level objectives.

These are some key Bell SLAs that are up here.

You can see that on these examples, uh they're mostly green.

There was a yellow from quarter one of 2024.

If you remember March of 2024, the storms were terrible and it knocked out all sorts of things.

And so this one was the P1 resolution, which is major incidents that they had to have resolve it in four hours.

And uh some of those outages, those power outages were while beyond our control lasted longer than four hours, and that's why that one's yellow.

Uh on our DAI side, you can see some of the SLAs that they're responsible for the last uh little while here, and most of these were uh actually all of these were uh met by the vendor.

Um so I say all that to say uh on top of all these, all the SLAs that we monitor for our vendors are there are 102 SLAs that we're making sure that we're providing service to the enterprise uh and to the public essentially on how we operate day in and day out.

So that being said, our our budget for this year is is as follows.

Uh our proposed expense budget is 45.1 million dollars, and our revenue budget is 45.8 million dollars.

The difference being that externals do not uh are not included in that expense budget.

So uh if if they if they pay us, and we hope that they do, that ends up going to our fund balance for the for the next when that's needed.

Uh you can see across our towers how that's broken off.

One thing I didn't mention in that first part was uh of the six uh structure overview of ISA was the office of the CIO.

That's essentially my executive team and the people that roll up to that and what that salary looks like and any applications that we have related to that.

Uh when you look at last year and why I thought it was important to have a little bit of inside baseball on how ISA works is uh we we are not taking a hit like like some other agencies and departments may have taken in a challenging budgeting year.

Uh you will see that uh if you look at the numbers, we're we're roughly going down about 17,000 from last year.

Uh there you'll notice that the 2025 revised is actually more than uh it's 567,000 higher.

That's just without actually calculating it.

That's because we went to a fiscal for a fiscal this year to the council for uh a migration that we're working on.

So that's why the revised budget is so different.

Uh breaking into character one.

Uh I as noted in in the previous presentations tonight, there is a cola and there is a uh uh insurance increases that we have to uh make do with in our character one.

Uh currently we are taking a over a six thousand dollar hit in our character one.

You can see how that's laid out across our areas.

Uh in character two, that's going down by 30,000.

I I think when you think of uh uh technology organization, uh when it comes to office supplies, we can probably cut a little bit there and be okay.

We'll figure it out.

Uh character three, this is primarily where the vast majority of our budget comes and from.

You can see the application services totals and the infrastructure services, and there's a slight decrease there.

I will say that uh we've already begun having conversations with our vendor partners essentially saying, hey, you know, in good times, there's a lot to go around.

But when things get challenging, we all have to like work together to find a way forward.

So they're prepared to meet us where we need to be next year in order to continue services with with most of our vendors and scale it appropriately.

From a character four standpoint, there are some uh channel 16 upgrades that we're going to do and some networking equipment that we need that we have a splight increase in character four.

I know that there have been questions about the ISA chargeback in the new ISA chargeback model.

So I'm hoping to address those in this conversation.

One of the things that we found, and if I could step back to 2022, I came in on in 2023.

In 2022, we had an issue where we were not able to budget for actuals of what people use.

We were going by what we budgeted for.

And the promise in 23 was that we were going to build it back and be able to build for the actual usage by each department and agency.

And we have, by and large.

Not without issue and not without problems, but we we were able to do that.

And as we did that and people started looking at their usage, they would compare an application to what I they were paying ISA for to what they could go and just put something in Amazon for.

Not understanding that's not including that someone else is managing it for you, not that it's encrypted, not that it's using uh other services to help connect across the city-county, that it's uh not backed up, you know, like there were just it wasn't apples to apples, and it was a very large problem that we had where people wanted to jump to insecure or insecure things or to things that they thought would be cheaper or or more available, and then turns out it might not be, right?

So what we did was we stripped out all of the overhead from all of the items that we charge for, and it we're just charging for actuals moving forward for this new model.

Um so that means that Councilor Boots's office 365 account is going to be whatever it costs us, that's what it's gonna be called, charge to city county council's office, right?

Um it makes it easier and enabled to be understood by those who are reviewing it.

Uh however, there is an ISA core services bucket where we've taken all that overhead and put that in there, and that is given out uh at a rate to uh FTE by the budget book.

Now that is not a perfect solution by any means, because I just told you that ISA has uh like 50-50 people uh by by FTE in the budget book, but we also have a hundred other people that are working for us and using ISA licenses, so it's not a perfect model.

So as we move forward, we're gonna find ways to make that work better.

Uh but for this first year to try and be more transparent to so people could make better usage of of their technology, we thought it would be easier to be uh direct cost for the agencies and departments.

Um so jumping into our programmatic and fiscal successes.

We have uh several initiatives and projects that we've been working on.

First up here is AI and Indy.

We spent a lot of time, a lion share this time, uh spearheaded by Kate COTEN on trying to get our arms around generative AI within the city-county.

Uh, there is a public-facing website explaining what it is that we do.

Uh certainly have uh had several workshops to get people to understand what it is.

We've had several trainings, uh, including that innovate us partnership, which I'll mention again later, or maybe not.

Um but the uh the uh the whole point here is that we're we're trying to change the culture on how we use technology in the city county to think about how we use data, to think about how we use AI and where we can do it in a pragmatic and proper approach with understanding how we how we think about where it could be the most beneficial with where we keep a human in the loop and to make sure that we're doing it in a way that is is practical.

Uh Windows 11, we are nearly complete with our Windows 11 rollout, uh, Windows 11 goes into life in October.

Uh OpenGov is a new platform that uh will help on the procurement side with with uh RFPs and RFQs from the purchasing side.

Also internally, we're working on an open gov solution for for contracts and for uh a contract portal.

We've spent the lion share the last year again working on a massive GIS upgrade, which will really help all the agencies and departments who make use of it on a day-in, day-out basis.

There's the training that I mentioned, and then WebEx Calling is our new calling platform that replaces the Cisco UCM product.

Uh so that is completed as of I think last week.

Uh service delivery.

We created a new SharePoint site uh that allows us to better share internally with our agencies and departments what it is that we do, how to interact with us, what we offer, uh, and really just help us communicate how we can help people moving forward.

It's something that I think internally communication is so hard.

Uh I think communication is hard all around.

Uh, but having a site where that uh a department or someone in a department or agency can go to and figure out what it is that ISA does and how ISA can help is really important.

We've seen a lot of positive results for that.

We're actually going to move that SharePoint site, uh, not move it, but expand uh a similar sites to uh I believe OCC, uh OFM purchasing HR, uh, and all the most of the other internal services agencies just to make it easier to understand how to operate within the city county.

Uh I mentioned the new chargeback model, uh policy changes.

So ISA will bring about policies to the IT board.

The IT board will approve those and those will become enterprise policies.

We have a new JIT AI policy that just uh came up.

We've made some incident response policies lately.

We've updated a lot of older policies that hadn't been updated for a while to bring them into more of a modern state.

Uh and uh also we've uh have the functional groups.

Functional groups are made up of agencies and departments to come together and talk about technology.

We've reinvigorated those, those have uh improved.

We have a new cyber training vendor, uh including fishing campaigns.

Uh we instituted live chat.

You can see the buildings that we've worked on and continue to work on with some of those.

Uh we have changed and secured our wireless network here uh within the city county.

Uh we continue to roll out free public Wi-Fi at that indie parks, we're up to 30 now.

Uh there are uh access upgrades continuing on each floor of the city county building.

We have a redundant fiber network that we're monitoring uh network and system uptime is the best it's been in a long time, knock on wood, uh, and continue to do all sorts of cybersecurity improvements throughout the city county.

From a fiscal standpoint, we have signed Microsoft uh and Cisco Enterprise Agreements when we benchmark those against other agreements from other local governments.

We had significant cost savings, uh so we're pretty proud of that.

And then there's some other things that we're continuing to work through on that slide.

Uh as far as community engagement and outreach, uh, similar to OCC, we're primarily internal, but we do have a website that we have uh that we enter uh interact with the public on on a day in a day out basis.

Uh we partner with OMWBD at most of their events, make sure that we're out there meeting the XBE vendor community.

Uh we also uh work with different local groups to help uh outreach for as far as local IT is concerned, whether it's women in technology or or other things.

We want to embrace the technology uh professionals within the city county, uh, and we try and do our best to support other state uh and local governments.

Uh there's a lot that can be said for having conversations with uh other directors or CIOs at different cities and counties throughout the state.

Um of the uh a good achievement that's coming up on September 15th.

The plan is for Indy.gov website to uh begin translation that is in partnership with the office of Office of Equity Belonging Inclusion and their language access plan.

Uh so that should start uh again on September 15th.

Once Grassy Creek came live on the Wi-Fi, uh free public Wi-Fi that made 30 city parks, as I mentioned earlier.

But I think if you look at that middle line there in that diagram, there's 12 terabytes of usage from July 1st to August 22nd of 2025 on the public Wi-Fi.

And that is that's a lot of data.

So I think that's a win.

Uh when it comes to our goals, priorities, and outcomes.

Look, next year is going to be a little challenging.

Uh I've I've shown you ways and what we work on day in and day out.

Uh I think that there's ways to be creative, there's ways to be pragmatic, there's ways to move the ball forward uh and work to get everyone in this in this building and the enterprise as a whole to embrace technology to understand how we can improve and understand and own our data.

Uh I think continuing forward on our Gen AI journey uh and understanding data and bringing that all together is important.

Everybody wants to do make data-driven decisions, right?

There's a lot of work we have to do as a city-county to get to that point where we can really do that.

Uh from a cybersecurity and resilience, we have tools that we can look to uh uh improve on, uh make get a little uh make it so that it's a little bit more effective or uh potentially use different parts of those tools.

Uh we can have a did new potentially a new digital front door for the city county that we need to look at, what that looks like.

That's something that is is coming in the next year, not coming to arrive, but coming to to look at what those options are.

Uh we have infrastructure that we'll need to modernize in the next couple years and understand what that plan looks like is something that we're looking to do.

And and finally, like I continue to perform and be accountable uh to our agency and department partners on how we deliver IT services is important to us.

Uh and then finally, these are some of the awards that we've won over the last uh year and a half, or at least since last time we talked, uh, and I'm happy to answer questions.

Thank you very much.

Here's a synopsis okay.

Internet goes down for two weeks completely.

Uh are we set up to be analog for the police and fire?

Yes.

Okay, good.

Counselor Bard.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

I've been keeping an eye on other cities and when they have had um denial of service attacks or ransomware attacks, and I noticed that St.

Paul had a pretty significant attack this summer where they were uh the entire city government was shut down for a period of time and they had procedures for recovering, um, which they did.

But the challenge is number one, had that ever happened in the first place.

And number two, um, so can you talk a little bit about our security procedures?

And number two, um, if something happens like a ransomware attack, how do we maintain um city services?

Well, I'm gonna be a little vague in that response since it's on public television.

Uh that being said, um we have procedures in place uh in in the event something like that would happen, and certainly we have defense and depth in place to hopefully prevent something to that effect.

I think as we continue to mature, uh there is more layers that we put on uh to prevent something like that, prevents a strong word to hold that off.

And and really when it comes to an attack like that, it's not a it's not uh an if it's going to happen, it's a when it's going to happen.

The best networks have been hacked.

If there's someone who's willing to get it willing to figure out a way, it's going to happen.

Uh all we can do is make sure that we're doing our best to prevent it, that we have uh other options to restore or have resilience in the event of an event like that.

Uh, and then with that, you know, we have conversations with departments and agencies on on what it is that how long that they can expect to be down and be able to to have continued to operate, uh, how long what their appetite is for that, and for each agency and department, that's a little bit different.

There's certainly ones that are I mentioned criticality earlier, right?

Uh certain ones that are are may have more critical services than others, but that isn't a shared conversation that's had, right?

Uh I don't know if uh the sheriff's office has had a conversation with um I don't I don't know uh BNS about who's who's more important, but I I think when it comes to safety of individuals, you know, maybe that's the sheriff's office, and that should be a priority service, and that's how we how we try and arrange it and look at it.

Um there are there are procedures, there are policies in place, there are even other analog options that we can pursue and have looked at uh and have in place.

Uh do they need continual update?

It has to be an evergreen thing.

Uh people change, uh response changes, um, and so we continue to try and make that as uh easy as possible for those who are going to operate in the event of an issue like that so that they can bring people back, uh, but also make it as best we can to prevent something like that.

I I please, yeah.

What and just expanding on that, and I'm realizing there's something I've never asked before, and that and or if I did I forgot.

One thing um uh I'm not sure who would be accountable for this, but you'd have a big role in it.

What what is our overall disaster recovery plan?

And do we have a disaster recovery plan and do we manage and update it and uh test it and pressure test it on an annual basis or or or more frequently than that?

Again, I I'll answer this in in in a in a kind of vague way, but but try and get to the heart of your question.

Uh with any plan like that, there's there's always constant work and it needs to be evergreen.

Uh there are certainly tabletop exercises that we run.

Um we test certain things uh along the way to make sure that there is resilience in the event of an incident.

Uh but when you when you try and think of the overall uh posture and potential areas where we could have have impact, what does that look like and how is that going to hamper us in the moment?

Uh you know, it it's hard to say that every angle's been covered, and I I I imagine it isn't uh, but we continue to as we mature, grow and and make sure that we're doing the best we can to guard that.

Okay.

Counselor Boots.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Thank you, Director Hill.

Just a couple questions.

One being um we hear a lot about the different silos of information systems across the enterprise and the difficulty of communication.

We got you know sales forest, we've got chameleon.

Is there a concerted effort to try to make it as much of a universal consistent data system versus all these competing things that you guys spend a lot of effort just making sure they don't crash each other, or how does IMPD talk to what have you?

Speak to that if you could please sure.

Um in respect to the data side and and being able to pull data from the different repositories across the city county.

Um it has stopped and started over time without continual support or or funding, I guess is is how I would say that.

Um we've had some efforts over the last year uh in that regard that frankly the result of that effort was uh lackluster, uh, and I was really disappointed with with who we partnered with in that regard.

Um I had high hopes for what that looks like.

Uh I still think there's opportunity for for that, uh particularly as technology has changed.

You don't necessarily need to go out and pull the data in from Salesforce.

You don't need to go out and pull the data in from Azure or or the Google Private Cloud or wherever, right?

You can go and access that data there.

Uh it's it's not as demanding as it used to be.

We don't need to have that single repository.

We can go out and touch those places and report off of that.

So I think that gives us hope for the future.

I I just this past year we had the conversation on on data classification.

I think the next the next next conversation we have is what are data roles.

So like ISA doesn't own the data, right?

We're just custodians of the data.

Uh, and what does that mean for the city and the county and and those agencies and departments?

Are they ready to actually own their data?

Do they have people in the agencies departments who understand their data?

Uh historically speaking, that has not been the case.

And so, in order to move that forward, and uh OAP has done a good job, I I think of of uh with any performance trying to have those conversations to get people to understand that data can mean something.

Uh, but to get real data ownership in those agencies and departments is is sort of the next goal, I think we have, and then from there, we can start to bring that together and actually have a true data lake and data warehouse are outdated at this point, but let's just use those terms.

So I I think that's still on the horizon.

Um getting there, uh I to be honest, I took a shot at it last year, it didn't work out.

So uh what's what's the next stop?

How how can AI help us do that potentially, or maybe not, right?

Uh so uh all that to say we're still working on that.

Sure, okay.

These other two are just fiscal questions.

You mentioned earlier the separate fiscal for ISA.

Yeah, can you remind us what that fiscal was?

Sure.

I I talk about defense in depth uh and we're we're working to migrate PeopleSoft, which is our ERP system from on-prem to cloud, uh, and that's what that fiscal was.

And then uh I recall we get a lot of complaints about Macs IT system, particularly its status.

We understand what happens, but we did a special appropriation for them to try to cure that, but I understand we have not cured it.

Can you shed some light on what the issue is there and what can we do about it?

Still hearing from constituents that I filed a complaint Tuesday and Friday, my they said my case is closed when we know that's not what's happening.

Yes.

Uh so I know that there has been work between the Mac and our vendor partner in order to make that work start moving forward.

Uh I don't know where that specifically is.

I know that's an engagement with the Mac and and that particular vendor partner on trying to use those funds this year in order to meet some of the needs.

I don't think that to be clear, what they do with that amount of money is not a cure all.

It's not it's not going to resolve, but it it should resolve some of the issues that you all are experiencing from your constituents, but but not all of them.

Um I I will say that uh we're we're waiting for that partnership to understand what it is that we're looking to accomplish, and ISA will work with them to get meet those needs.

Yeah.

Could I just ask you to push that ball along as best you can?

You got it.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you.

Councillor Kill.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Uh just it thank you for, I guess uh talking about that while this year's budget is flat, you're talking to vendor partners saying what can we do to achieve because you were one of the rare organizations that is not bringing like a minus four percent to the table here, and it's really not in character one, which is which is different than a lot of the departments.

It's it's in your vendor agreements.

My my question is that, and and I guess I would preface this.

This is uh building off what counselor boots said, but the the basis of this is that in any long-term organization, processes, software, hardware, et cetera, get set up by somebody who may themselves be long gone, and then because that's the way it was always done, we just keep on doing it.

Is there is there any effort to go back to departments and say, do you need this odd piece of software, odd piece of hardware, whatever?

Could this not just move to Microsoft Teams or Microsoft 365 or whatever?

Can can you go into that?

And I guess so that I can yield back here.

I would I would encourage if if that's happening with the other departments, I would encourage even having those conversations with the the 25 counselors as well, because I think all of us have a lot of interactions, and uh my perception is that sometimes we might be able to see as sort of an outside person, like, hey, this that I always get this, or this is always done this way type of thing.

And I feel like to your comment of you don't own the data, you're the custodian.

But a lot of times you are asked, hey, figure this out when the proper solution, probably in front probably for many years has been you need to modernize, you need to move.

You said people soft moving to the cloud, right?

That that's a logical thing to me, but something had to force that to happen.

And I feel I guess I would I would add, I feel like the real savings that we need to get without cutting the actual services, that's the type of thing that needs to happen.

We need to go figure out.

I still want to be able to do X, Y, or Z, but instead of using some old, you know, like you said, data warehouse, data lake, whatever.

But if we've decided that SaaS or Power BI or whatever is our tool of choice, if you're not on it, how do we get you there?

So sorry for the long-winded question, but I yield back.

Thank you.

Um just just to direct one of the fiscal things on here is system rationalization and and and to me, uh, modernization rationalization are usually uh cousins uh for what that looks like.

Um we have a uh application portfolio that has been maturing over the years, and and what it does is it can do a couple different things where it can look at what those legacy applications are, where they where they are from uh a cost issue, like or a recommendation like this is something that needs to be upgraded.

But one of the conversations that we we have we have and we have regularly is like, hey, this is this is uh no longer going to work on these systems.

Can we need to upgrade this?

And then it goes into hey, let's talk to the vendor, let's get connected.

And sometimes those vendors are direct with agencies or departments, and so we're we're sort of that middleman uh, and I don't know if you all are familiar with it, but IT and technology organizations get into this like finger pointing thing, and I I really have no time for that.

There's there's a there are customers here, there are services that need to be handled.

Let's find a way to get those upgraded and move forward.

And so this is a conversation that we have all the time.

Do we have legacy applications that need to be upgraded, services that need to be upgraded?

Certainly we do.

Uh it's prioritizing those and finding them and then having willing partnership uh at the agency and department level to get those upgraded because a lot of times what you'll have is to your point, like this is this is what we've always I've always pushed this button.

I just want to push this button.

Uh and so uh can we push this button and and like like uh confetti will shoot from the sky if you go to this application, whatever the incentive is, like how can we incentivize people moving forward?

And sometimes uh it it needs to be more than just uh hey, we're gonna switch your which switch your switcher application, switch your switcher thing.

Uh we need something where they'll see the benefit, it's going to save them time.

It'll take them 10 seconds less to push that button, and then they can push the button 20 more times in a day, and that's something they really would like to do.

Like, or how does that benefit the residents?

You know, how does that finding the ways to sell that upgrade process to uh our internal customer base is is an important thing that we continue to work on and strive for.

But thank you.

Thank you.

Any other counselors?

Anyone in the audience see you at a review and analysis.

Thank you.

All right, thanks.

Last and not least is the Office of Audit and Performance.

Okay.

So here's kind of maybe 14 pages.

This is good.

Under four, yes, we are very much so.

That's right.

That's right.

Efficiency.

I wish OCC was still here because I could file a tort claim from having to sit in those audience chairs for two hours.

But it's it's good to be with you uh members of the committee.

That was supposed to be funny.

I loved it.

It really hurts that like it hurts, yeah.

They're not great.

Uh but it's good to be with you tonight.

Uh I'm Leslie Jones, director of the Office of Audit and Performance.

I'm joined by my deputy director, Vivian Agnew, and our manager of performance and innovation, Caitlin Edwards is also here with us tonight.

Uh looking forward to sharing our details for our proposed 2026 budget.

Um, and I will actually mix it up this year and let Vivian kind of take you through some of the just general specifics about our office, and then I will jump back in with the specifics of the budget.

Uh, really quickly, I'll do a brief agency overview for you guys.

Uh, we have two teams.

We are um a performance innovation shop and also an audit shop.

Um, they have very similar goals at the end of the day, which are kind of high performing government, transparency, and accountability across all departments and agencies within our enterprise.

Um, to tackle that work though, our performance team um kind of takes a sort of a more cared approach.

They offer uh different kinds of trainings, particularly in continuous improvement methodologies, data literacy, and data analysis.

Well, our audit team conducts performance audits in compliance with generally accepted government auditing standards and oversees the enterprise's external audit contract.

In terms of staffing, we have nine FTEs total.

We're currently hiring for a senior auditor position, so we're staffed at eight folks right now.

You'll notice from our graphs, we have uh general parity across gender, so we're 50-50 there, and you can see that our annual salary by gender is pretty much equal, so we're doing well there as well.

Um, our office isn't super diverse demographically, we only have two different kinds of ethnicities represented there.

Um, we have a lot of diversity in the experience that our staff bring to the table.

We have folks who've been with the enterprise for a long time.

We have folks who have backgrounds as teachers who've come from the private sector, and um that level of experience has been invaluable in helping us to do our jobs better essentially.

Um I want to make a note that we've preserved in our budget.

Uh about $10,000 for staff to pursue continuing education opportunities.

Uh, we're a small shop, and so we have to do um kind of a lot with a little, and the more that we can learn, the better we can um serve the enterprise.

Um next, I want to mention also that our focus generally in our office is on teamwork and collaboration.

We don't do any project solo.

We try to always have more than one person sort of working on something, and that translates over to the way that we work with departments and agencies.

We find that our projects and goals kind of come to fruition a little bit easier when we are collaborating as opposed to coming in and telling people what to do.

Next, I'll talk through our programmatic and fiscal successes.

Um, our big one that you've heard from us quite a few years now is our Indie Performance program.

So this year was the first year we hosted a sort of symposium.

So we invited participants who had been part of the program in previous years, come and show the things they'd built using tools like Power BI.

Um, we had our staff talk about the training in general, so folks knew what the offerings were.

Um, and so far this year, we've trained 42 employees across 23 different departments in those data literacy pieces in Power BI.

Um also in January, we were able to launch our first uh virtual lien training.

We previously offered that in person, so we were limited by space, we were limited by our staff time, but because we are able to launch this virtual version, um, we freed up a ton of staff time and are able to reach a larger audience across the enterprise.

They can work on it, you know, during their free time or if they have extra hours so it's a lot more accessible to folks.

Through things like um using tools like virtual training and intentional scheduling just from our team, we've been able to offer 745 hours worth of performance management training to the wider enterprise.

That is at no cost.

Our staff are putting those on.

So things like lean, Power BI data literacy, these are tools that are useful across all agencies and departments and things that employees can take into their careers as they grow and continue to work with the city.

Um we also were able to utilize vacancy savings and other savings to fund a portion of the city county employee survey uh for the first survey in eight years.

So very exciting stuff.

This is from our inaugural symposium.

Um it was a very fun event.

We had a lot of popcorn.

Um next year you guys should come.

We already have a date set, so we'll send it out.

And I'll let Wes take over.

Thank you.

Looking at our community engagement and outreach, uh, again, we're an internal-facing agency, so we don't have a significant amount of that, but uh both of our audit and performance teams have done a great job of networking and finding ways to engage uh the performance team, specifically for external type events.

They participated in some lean coffee events, which have been put on by Green Dot Consulting here in town, and that allows them to kind of compare notes on process improvement methodologies and teaching strategies with other folks around the city that are doing similar work, and they've also participated in the State Department of Education's information technology teams, uh, networking events, and they have a good line of contact with them.

So uh all about building professional networks and resources that we can tap into when when necessary.

On the audit side, uh we're starting to do some more networking with local audit firms.

We obviously only have four auditors, and so there are likely some skill gaps there, and so when we do have the opportunity to contract from a third-party basis, it's nice to know who is available and who has skills that we could utilize at a certain point.

And then also continuing with the theme of internally, we're looking to launch in Q4, Q3 or Q4 here.

This team-specific internet page, ISA has been super helpful in helping us uh learn how to get that stood up, and it will basically contain information that we have available, but about what our office does, the audit approach, also on the performance side, how to engage with us based on your needs, and it will just be another resource for folks internally to access and learn more about what we do and how we can engage and help with them.

Uh if that goes well, I think we could potentially spin that into an external site, which would be a better way to communicate with the public.

I know uh spoken within the audit committee and some other things about ways the council can be brought abreast about certain audit related issues, and I think uh we're we'll we're trending towards a way to maybe formalize that more and make it more uh consistent from year in and year out.

Looking at 2026, uh, our priorities and goals.

Um, from the audit standpoint, a number one is gonna be a at least a 25% expansion in audit coverage across the enterprise, and we're measuring that by units.

So with the at the current within the current year, we had uh engagement across audits, cash counts, and other kind of uh general engagements of seven units, agencies and departments, and uh hoping for uh nine or more in 2026.

Again, those are across different types of engagement, so they're not all traditional audits.

Um, with again such a limited staff, it's hard to cover everyone, but we're trying to find ways and revise our approach to maximize our our effectiveness.

Second goal is to maintain maintain participation and the performance and innovation teams educational initiatives, and that's gonna be measured by total hours.

Um Vivian mentioned we were at 750 some year to date.

Uh we did close to 1200 last year, so it'd be great if we can hit that mark again.

Part of the success that was also kind of referenced by Director Hill that we've had with the Indy Performance program is that it's been going for so long, it's kind of in year close to five now of kind of different iterations, but of this current general format.

And so with that, we've touched a lot of folks that are still here and they developed a lot of skills, but with that, they don't need to come through again.

And so it's hard to kind of find the new crop of folks and advance the ones that have used those skills over the period.

So being able to maintain that that participation from an hour standpoint is is a s is a relevant goal, I believe, at this point.

And then third, more broadly, this is kind of more on on my shoulders and Vivian's a little bit, is we've gotten more involved with um helping to try to reform some enterprise and company culture efforts, uh, including the survey that she mentioned earlier.

Um the there's a couple working groups that have been established that are going on, and uh the work for that will really continue.

And and so, in order to really make institutional change, I think we have to keep our foot on the gas with those uh issues, and and OAP will continue to pay uh a role at the forefront of that.

Looking at our budget now in total, it's just over 1.95 million uh in total.

That is a $55,727 reduction from 2025's budget.

Uh it's largely a reallocation of character one and character three funds to to meet our needs.

We do not have any revenue sources, though uh if these training efforts continue to be successful, we could maybe find a way like OSA or OCC or ISA to charge back, but I don't think that's gonna happen anytime soon.

Um looking at our character one, we had a decrease of $563 from 2025.

Of course, as everyone said, the COLA's increase uh causes an increase in wages as well as health care costs.

Uh we were able to upset that by reductions in our workers' comp disability and incentive pay.

Uh the incentive pay specifically is not a complete reduction.

We just had more budget than we could actually pay out given the terms of of incentive pay um restrictions, and so uh we have enough to take still take care of our staff.

That is is goal one, one A, one B is continuing to focus on our people, especially when we had to kind of tighten the belt a little this year.

I wanted to maintain um everything we could for for our talented staff.

As Vivian mentioned, we only have one vacancy, and we're in the process of entering for interviewing for that and should be filled by the end of the year.

Moving on to character two, there's no change in our very moderate supply budget.

And then on to character three is our our most significant item.

Um this is also about a 54,000 uh dollar decrease from 2025.

And the way we were able to do that was to allocate unused funds from contractual agreements that we have used historically, um, shrunk some other budgets on some discretionary things and and items that we were kind of able to contract with unilaterally, and um those were all done to kind of offset the increases.

The the largest percentage of this goes to the external audit contract because that contract sits with us.

So our our great auditors at Forvest Mazars, um, their fees will take a little increase next year, and so we had to absorb that through moving some things around.

Character 4, no change again, um, and no anticipated use of that for for next year.

And then character five, we had a slight decrease uh due to some reduction in our OCC chargebacks based on utilization.

So with that, uh those are the major elements of our budget.

Happy to entertain any questions you might have about the Office of Audit Performance.

Councilor Nielsen.

Uh thank you, Chairman.

Uh, and um just a few quick questions.

Um thank you, uh Director Jones.

Um so I mean you made a joke about the the chargeback model, and that's actually was a kind of the line of questioning I was gonna ask you about, which was um which projects you are specifically like how you how OAP is utilized in the enterprise, like how how does OAP assigned a project?

Let's start there.

Yeah, yeah.

That's a good question.

So there's I'll try to make this as brief as possible.

There's two kind of different paths between audit and performance.

Audit essentially has the ability to engage with any body agency department that the council has budgetary approval for, which is a large number of them, and uh a couple of the municipal corporations, I believe.

Okay.

From the performance standpoint, uh it's a there's not really any kind of regulations on it, so it's it's a lot of uh either soliciting participation or uh folks will come out directly to us and ask for assistance on certain things.

Um and so those are the two kind of primary paths through which we engage with our okay so uh because the question what I was getting as is there ever given that you are a I think you use the the language division of the mayor's office, just what the direction is, if there's a if there's a policy goal right or a policy objective, how we can ensure that we're utilizing I mean your shop, right, to to come in and provide some strategic advice, direction, and and so just was curious how you all are assigned projects for lack of better way of saying it.

Absolutely yeah, so historically, like I said, we've had kind of free reign to to pursue whatever we need to pursue.

I think through some intentional uh shameless kind of marketing, we've kind of touted our services and and what we can can provide.

Again, we're a small shop, but I think in the last year we've seen some increases in that where there has been an interest and they've folks have come to us about specific things that are maybe not in the traditional audit realm to either evaluate their effectiveness or their performance, and so that's a space where we want to be.

We want to be supportive and collaborative with our our colleagues and help them do their work better.

Okay, thank you, Director.

And Mr.

Chairman, it's two quick questions I promise they'll be quick.

Um the audit.

So for the audit for the entire uh enterprise, is it done by one firm?

Yes.

Okay, so it's done by one firm.

So are the auditors on staff, are they preparing for the audit?

I mean, is it I know an audit is not just hiring one firm.

And so what kind of maybe speak to what some of your your staff are doing during that the auditors are doing during that?

During the actual outside or kind of in the shoulders of of the audit, yeah.

Absolutely, yeah.

So we oversee the contract, we engage with the auditor and their leadership and stuff, and but that kind of all took place last year, so that's all kind of set.

Uh in terms of the engagement itself, we do provide some support hours into it.

So this year there was just a there were just a couple of us, and we do some very kind of low-level testing that helps reduce the load on their audit team.

And so uh it also helps reduce the bill just a slightly slight bit.

Okay, but a large amount of their engagement is with OFM and and our fine team over there, and so we um are almost just a small little part of their team of the Fortress Mazars team throughout the audit.

And and then the final question I was gonna ask was and you you you briefly touched on it, but just for kind of the public's, I think when you say audit, right?

Everybody, there's like a huge financial component to that, obviously.

You know, we have the audit committee, one of our members is right here.

Um but then can you maybe talk about how what the importance or why this audit process is done outside of the OFM, like why a separate division of the mayor's office versus the Office of Finance and Management.

Uh in terms of like why OFM?

Yeah, I mean just it kind of like w what kind of the rationale is for that to sit outside of the OFM kind of hierarchy.

Oh, absolutely, yeah.

So uh the office over time has had a lot of different kind of aims and and goals.

Uh once the performance element was brought in uh and the team was kind of split in half, it feels like there was more of a deviation away from the financial type audits, and that's currently how we operate.

We don't do many any at all really financial audits, that they're performance-based audits based on government auditing standards, and so we're usually taking a set of criteria that's defined by the agency or department themselves and measuring them against what they say they do.

And so there's an element of kind of independence of one, we have the time, and that's our focus and our jobs to do that, but also we can look at it from an outside perspective, especially on the performance side, where we tend to make more recommendations, more strong recommendations about how to improve important performance and how they can implement certain elements to improve their work.

The audits tend to be more uh denotation of things that are going right and going wrong and then uh suggestions on how to fix them based on kind of best practices.

Thank you generally how thank you director thank you chairman comments or questions seen on anyone in the audience okay go for it make it short very I will thank you um uh deputy director agnew had mentioned the survey was was that the AI survey no that was not the AI survey so this is a survey uh that's that part of that company culture sort of effort that we're doing so that's a survey of uh city county employees so we've I think wrapped that up in this past week yeah it just closed yesterday oh okay when can we expect the final work product uh that's a great question we're just on a call today uh there's another element of it there our our partner will be doing some focus groups with employees uh but we're engaged with them through the end of the year so it'll be by the end of the year that we'll have an actual report all right thank you last call any other questions seeing that we'll see you at review review and analysis we are adjourned.

Thank you