Good evening.

Welcome to the admin and finance committee meeting.

So I can start the meeting with the introductions to the left.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Derek Cahill, District 23.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Mike Doke, District 24.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Brian Mowray, District 25.

Do our right.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair Nick Roberts' report.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

We may Allen at District 15 depart.

Thank you, Chairman Andy Nielsen, District 14.

Good evening, Chairman Mescary.

Krista Wells, district 11, West Side.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Dan Boots, District 3, Washington Lawrence Townships.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

John Barth, representing Council District 7.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman, Maggie Lewis.

Frank Mascarry District 19 on the Southeast Side.

Up first is proposal of 119 approves the appointment.

Mr.

Gathers, take a seat.

You're on you're on the clock.

This is the first meeting.

This is okay right here.

Well, tell us a little bit about yourself and why you're like this and like to have this job.

Well, good evening, everyone, and thank you.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Thank you to the council and the residents of the Indianapolis coming to this role from South Bend, Indiana.

Excited about the opportunity to serve the people here as the new deputy mayor of neighborhoods.

Served in the mayor's office and deputy chief of staff for a number of years.

Recently served as the executive director of venue parks and arts, our parks department, up in South Bend.

Sorry.

All right.

You know, understanding that, you know, South Bend and Indianapolis are both different.

Um we we understand that, but um good government is one where I'm excited for the opportunity to continue to serve, um, you know, continue to make those community connections um here in Indianapolis.

Um part of my uh collegiate career, I played at Butler University, and so played basketball there for the Bulldogs, and um then also then took that took that opportunity from going to school and playing basketball to IU Health and worked in a numerous of roles there.

Um so excited to be back within the community.

Um, excited to be able to take a lot of the experiences that I learned along the way along the journey and bring them back into this role with a phenomenal team.

Um, a team of works really a team of folks that are really dedicated to the public service and daily work here in our community, um, and also excited for the opportunity to work with each and every one of you within your districts and within your neighborhoods.

Um, I understand Indianapolis has a very diverse um population and very diverse uh distinct areas, um, and so I want to learn individually which each neighborhood and and the people in those neighborhoods uh what they bring and and what and what requests we can get across the finish line.

Um there's a lot of work to be done and had, and and so I'm excited to be able to add value to that.

Um and other than that, I'm just I'm excited.

I'm really excited to be here.

I think this is a phenomenal phenomenal opportunity, it's great momentum here in Indianapolis, um, all the work that's happening, um, and so uh happy to answer any questions that you might have.

Thank you.

Uh any questions to counselors and comments.

Councilor Barr.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Um, can you being deputy mayor of uh neighborhood engagement?

Can you sketch out what your plan is to connect with neighborhoods and hear their priorities and how the city would help engage with them?

That's a great question.

Uh for me, you know one like as I said earlier, I want to get to know each neighborhood individually.

Um again, a lot of the work that has to take place is I have to listen first.

Um I have to understand what's going on.

I'm still early in the process of learning, you know, the full picture and landscape of the different areas, but we have a phenomenal team of the mayors and neighborhood advocates who I've I've been starting to meet individually and working with them to understand what's happening in these neighborhoods and how we can best serve uh those folks and so um my yeah, my approach is very simple.

Listen first, um, align resources where we can and um and act act where we can and then also follow through.

Thank you.

Any other questions?

Council.

Well, we could just follow up.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

So and I'm not asking for a response for this because you've really have only been doing this job for about eight minutes.

So this is this is a this is a heady issue, but I'm just giving you an example.

So, like for example, in my council district in the last several weeks, there's been two situations where there have been um gunfire, and then one of them uh a death and multiple people injured um due to um irresponsible hosts at Airbnbs.

Um so I'm in the midst of working uh within the administration to help facilitate that.

But everywhere I go, um in fact I have to to uh ensure I get out of this meeting fast enough to get to Wharfling and have a discussion with them.

Um there are people who are expressing a high level of concern about Airbnbs.

So that's a challenge for us because we're limited by what we can do from the General Assembly, but there's more we can do internally.

So I should have a meeting next week where I bring in together various folks within the city and um council staff and folks with legal backgrounds to think this through.

So that's a great example to me of something you should really get involved with that you're probably learning about here for the first time.

But that's like something not only affects my district but all districts because the proliferation of Airbnbs and how even though we're limited from the city uh from the state perspective, how we can do more from the city perspective.

So I'd love to bring you into that, and that's a great thing that is happening citywide that really needs, I think, someone in this role to jump into it.

Thank you.

Thank you, counselor.

Any counselor, um yeah, boots.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Um, thank you, Mr.

Gathers.

Uh I see you had experience with golf course management in South Bend.

Any suggestions or ideas on how to uh better manage the Indianapolis golf course portfolio?

That's a great question.

Um hadn't had an opportunity to meet with um the golf division or or parks and rec, so I'm looking forward to that opportunity to learn more and happy to follow up and how I can best take my experience from South Bend and bring it down here.

Great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Any other questions, counselors?

Seeing anyone in the audience who like to speak on this?

Seeing on to entertain a motion.

So moved.

It's moved and seconded.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye, opposed, no.

Well welcome.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Up next is um Mary County Treasurer, Miss Ms.

Barbara Lawrence.

It looks like you have two uh two items, correct?

I do.

All right.

Rodney can bring it back.

Okay.

It's a little show and tell tonight.

There you go.

Barbara, you have the floor.

Okay, I am starting at the top of the agenda with proposal number 94.

Um, just so everybody knows, I am Barbara Lawrence.

I am joined here this evening by Rodney Shine, the chief deputy treasurer, and we want to talk about paperless billing.

And it's kind of a funny story.

Um we started this initiative about six months ago where we wanted to ramp up and increase our numbers for paperless building, because it saves us about 80 cents to mail for every person we get signed up on paperless.

It saves us about 80 cents.

So we undertook this initiative, and someone said asked me about the ordinance, and I thought, you know, it's a good thing, maybe I'll look and see just to see what the ordinance says.

And I discovered that uh we had an ordinance that was originally drafted in 2011, and somehow no one knows how when there was a writer and amendment to the treasurer's office ordinance in 2012, it was eliminated.

So uh I am here to get right with God and the Department of Local Government Finance and put this ordinance back in place.

It is essentially the exact same version of what was considered in 2011, and it's still in effect, and we've been doing nothing differently.

Um, but I just thought since we're trying to ramp this program up, it would be a good idea to really have the ordinance in place.

So isn't that a funny story?

Thank you, Barbara.

Um, my question, people would still have the coupon if they want to mail in their taxes, correct?

Well if they I get mine and I just write checks for them.

Is that how this is still happened that way?

If you're paperless you still get a bill and you can print it out.

Right but this way they can go online and pay it pay it online basically if they want you have that option they can do that whether they're paperless or not this is merely saying that your tax bill will be emailed to you instead of put it in the mail.

How you choose to pay it is still you can mail in a check you can go online's office surprisingly there are a number of people that still come to the treasurer's office.

Any can Councillor Bart.

Hey Mr Chairman um Madam Treasurer just to tune in to just the industry standard is moving in this direction essentially the industry standard are other counties doing this both here and across the country well it it's a little surprising I have uh to go to some other counties to research some property taxes and a lot of them actually don't have paperless billing.

We've had it probably I'm guessing since 2011 when the original entry when the original ordinance was introduced that it's something like I said we have about 5000 a little under 5000 right now I'd really like to get that up to 75,000.

But I think in most counties that this is the way they're going to okay.

Councilor boots.

Thank you Mr.

Chairman thank you Madam Treasurer quick question on um uh online payment it's if I understand it's still one percent service fee of your tax owed uh if you pay with credit card or debit card it's two point five percent okay money does not come to the county or the treasurer's office it's a fee that's assessed by our third party bill or which is in voice cloud um and we negotiated that down about a year and a half ago two years ago from 2.65%.

Okay and is that in its industry standard because my experience is you know you want to go online because it's the quickest way to do it but I I was facing 50 dollars just to do that and I thought that seemed a little high.

Well I do want to say if you pay with your check and a routing number and account number it's 95 cents it's substantially less.

And I'll tell you we have been just because I'm curious what's out there we've been meeting with a number of companies and I'm pretty satisfied that what we're paying is in the ballpark of the average so you always want it to be as low as they can get and I think when we look at go into our next vendor we would probably hit that hard yeah okay I'm sorry sure I'd also add that that for for the people that do pay online roughly 85% pay through their checking account which would dramatically reduce their fees.

I use credit card just to build the travel points I mean that's I didn't do everything that way.

So but having to do that 50 bucks a pop makes me think twice.

All right yes.

Thank you chairman Gary um yeah thank you I appreciate you walking through that and that with with property taxes just due to pay the 95 cents it's very easy from um so understanding the role of the treasurer's office and you know collecting managing and investing property taxes for the financial institutions that you are using for those services are do they offer?

I guess uh kind of in line with maybe where Vice President Barth was going.

Are there is it a small group of companies that are providing these like payment remitted services, or are like the larger institutions that are coming in and having an opportunity to manage significant amount of money on behalf of the city?

Are they moving into this space at all?

Like a in terms of payment processing and doing some of the space that would kind of over the long run lower the the cost for taxpayers and make it a little bit easier.

I'm gonna start answering the question and I'm gonna ask Rodney to sort of uh follow up with.

Um I have been surprised as we saw it to meet with these companies.

There are a lot of firms out there that do this business, and some of them are larger banks.

I believe Chase offers something like this, um, so there are some synergies that we could probably realize if we had a banking relationship established with payment right now.

Those are two separate um functions, as I would say, and we manage all of our money internally, we don't have a third party.

He he does that, Rodney does that.

Um but there are a number of firms that are out there, it's a very competitive market.

We are in the process right now, and you will be hearing more about this in the next presentation.

But we're in the middle of implementing a brand new tax system, and I'm trying to get sort of things lined up.

We don't want to be doing a new tax system while we're doing a new payment system, so um that that's probably something we're gonna look at in the next year.

So do you have anything to add?

Yeah, the the large financial institutions are becoming more and more full full service.

So so when it comes to uh card services or um, you know, counting accounting services, they want the integration to and it's good for for ISA because the bigger banks that can do it all, it helps with integration, it reduces fraud, and hopefully over time also reduces costs.

Any other questions?

I have one other comment.

On the uh credit cards, my business uh we charge three percent for the credit cards, but debit cards are free.

Have you considered that?

The banks can figure that out, they know exactly if it's a cavit or not.

And we were negotiating for a lower rate a couple of years ago.

I specifically broke the two out and said, can we charge a lower rate for a debit card?

Because those are funds that are automatically available, and I thought they should be treated, but um that the building company prefers to think uh of plastic as plastic, whether it's a debit card or a credit card, it's a swipe fee of like 15 cents for me.

So yeah, you know, you might ask that question.

Any other comments or questions?

Anyone in the audience like speak on this?

Seeing any energy in a motion?

So it's moon segmenting.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye, opposed, none.

Thank you.

Proposal one twenty.

Proposal one twenty, and this right here is a beautiful cash counter.

And let me start by saying this is a very old cash counter, it's in the it's at the end of its useful life, and we have new currency that's coming out at the end of this year, and I think one year it's 50s and the next year it's tens.

Um they've told us that they won't support this.

I mean, basically, you just put the cash in there and it like it says, like the name says it counts the cash.

Um, so we are seeking an additional appropriation.

We tried to muster through last year and get this done, but we didn't have enough character three budget, so we are coming here humbly asking for an additional appropriation of $20,000, which would go from the general fund as an additional appropriation to our character three budget to buy seven new cash counters.

Okay, thank you.

Councillor Barn.

Thank you.

So that's just news to me that so the United States is updating the security components of cash.

Is that what's happening?

And that's why you need thank you.

Yeah, and the good news about the new machines is that it can be programmed when there's a new currency, so that we don't have to come back to you every time there's new currency.

So thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

I oddly enough have a interesting story.

I had a 100 bill from the 1950s that a new machine did not count.

So while we think about the new currencies, I want to flag for you all.

I had to go in and like it wasn't just a marker, they were scratching and smelling because of the way the paper and it would looked really good because it was of an old but well taken care of bill.

And so just keep that in mind as you go with those new cash counters that I'll be supporting that it's the it's the older ones that aren't getting counted.

Um and so keep that in mind.

Any other counselor?

Thank you, Chairman.

Um this has been a really good education on your part of work you all do.

Um so just sort of kind of maybe complete the conversation.

What you talked a lot about the the proportion of um taxpayers who are using your e-billing system and all that, so about how many property tax payers use cash.

Um I can give you a dollar amount, that's helpful.

That's about 1.7 billion in property taxes and about 20 million of that is cash.

It's it's not a huge amount, but it so another funny story is when I first took over as treasurer.

I had people telling me that people would bring grocery bags of cash in, and I thought, yeah, right.

It happens.

It happens.

Well, I appreciate Treasure, yeah.

I was saying I appreciate that.

I think, and in putting that in in scale, you know, we are spending 20,000.

I very much support this proposal, but it's it it you it's a lot of a lot of cash, it's not just a few hundred bucks that's coming up.

If I told you the original version was fifty thousand dollars, okay, good job.

It was because when we started looking, we told them what we wanted, and when I got the number back and we had further discussions and pushed the envelope a little bit, so we're we're we're getting what we need.

So any other questions?

See none.

Real quickly, does do they come in with bags and bags of coins just uh because of just Groma?

Uh 10,000 dollars worth of pennies or we on occasion do have people that will bring in as many pennies as they can.

Actually, we like that though because there's a penny shortage.

So we have a machine to count that too.

Not this machine.

No, I understand a coin machines is right.

Correct.

Alright, anyone from the audience like speak on this?

Seeing none, understand a motion, second, move and second.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye, opposed nine.

Thank you very much.

We appreciate your consideration.

Up next is proposal one twenty-one approves an additional one point one hundred and eighty thousand dollars to the budget.

Who was presenting this one?

For information um services agency.

Good evening, Mr.

Chairman and members of the board, our committee.

Um, we'll just take a second to get our presentation set up.

All right, good evening.

Good evening.

Um, my name is Kate Coat and I'm the chief Digital Officer for Information Services agency.

I'm here with Kevin Moore, Chief Operating Officer, and today I'm here presenting our 2026 fiscal ordinance or spring fiscal request.

Let's see.

Sweet.

ISA is requesting one point 1.18 million dollars in additional appropriations.

This investment protects service reliability, reduces future operating and replacement costs, meets state requirements, and prepares our enterprise for major system transitions that are on the horizon, including next generation 911 preparedness and alignment with data for our property tax system that the treasurer mentioned in her last presentation.

All projects directly address operational risks or reduce future financial exposure.

I'm going to now go through some of the projects that we have planned for this in a bit more detail.

The request leverages ISA fund balance property reassessment dollars and the state of Indiana grant funds to reduce pressure on any single source, as well as aligning projects with the most appropriate funding source.

You'll see here the project mixes ranging from infrastructure refresh, phone line infrastructure, edge device refresh, CAMA file migration, and our GIS improvements, which is slated to be reimbursed by the state.

So we'll go through these projects in a little bit more detail.

All right, for our infrastructure refresh, this is part of a 1.1 multi-year investment, a five-year lease and includes the request is for $300,000 to replace aging infrastructure required for secure stable enterprise operations, and is this work is essential to ensure reliability, cybersecurity resilience, and capacity for growing our digital services.

We are anticipating an additional $800,000 via annual COIT supplemental funding to offset this cost.

Our phone line infrastructure modernization is slated to replace obsolete copper telecom circuits as these lines are urgently being phased out by major telecom carriers in favor of fiber optic, FOIAP, and cellular networks.

Without this project and the planning around it, the 2027 circuit costs are projected to triple.

So this is a cost avoidance.

This creates significant new operators, which would create significant new operating costs.

This work is for network test access points or taps and packet brokers.

These tools are critical in detecting threats, checking network segments, and supporting other cybersecurity tasks, and they provide a clear view of network traffic without slowing things down.

There is extremely important, particularly around election traffic, and it's these are needed to make meet requirements and analyze information in real time.

All right, our CAMA file migration.

Using property reassessment funds, this project modernizes legacy Apex files around CAMA and migrates them into a file format that meets the requirements of our new platform.

This is work is crucial for data continuity from between the two systems as we prepare to migrate and ensures future sustainability for the for both the auditor, assessor, and treasurer.

And the last project is our state of Indiana IGO IGIO or their geospatial unit grant.

This was awarded in January 2026.

It will be reimbursed quarterly, and it plans to enhance foundational GIS data sets, address roads, parcels, emergency boundaries, and again, this is a preparation for the NG 911 requirements, which ensures that when a call is made, it geolocates to a point versus the closest cell tower.

So very important work as you might imagine.

It also aligns with the National Emergency Number Association standards and again strengthens our long-term quality consistency and auditability.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you for your presentation.

Anyone have a comments to the councillor Bower?

Thank you for the presentation.

Looking at the slide deck, can you expand on some more of the detail of the modernizing aging infrastructure, what that means more specifically?

Yes, I'm going to turn a high level it's it's our servers, but I'm going to turn it over to Kevin for more details.

Sure, sure.

Yeah, this is uh aging server infrastructure.

A lot of uh the servers that we manage, application database servers, etc.

Uh, are on infrastructure that's aging, going end to life soon within the next year.

Uh so the plan is to uh get ahead of that, uh purchase the new hardware and equipment, uh start the migration well ahead of that, um, so we can maintain operations on that new new hardware.

So it's almost all of the servers, is what the infrastructure is.

Okay, all right, great.

Thanks.

It is part of we are we are leveraging and layering on a cloud migration strategy as well.

So we're not fully investing in on-prem, but we're it this is part of uh a diversified um approach to our story.

Is that is that Amazon Cloud Services?

We currently um leverage Azure space.

Okay, thanks.

But some folks in the city county do leverage AWS, yeah.

Any questions?

Counselor Boots.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Thanks for the presentation.

Just briefly looking at your slide of the uh improvements showing all the balances.

Can you just refresh which of these um caches of money are being reimbursed by the state?

Of course.

The state of Indiana grant funds line, the the final line in the chart for 30,000 will be reimbursed quarterly, and the edge device refresh for 250,000 will be a reimbursed as well.

Okay.

So, really, for city-county money, then it's the number is the 1.18 minus the reimbursement amount.

Yes, we need the fiscal for budgeting to even out.

But yes, sir, yes.

Thank you.

Any other comments or questions?

Anyone in the audience would like to speak on this.

Seeing none, entertain a motion.

Um then move and second, all those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We have one one more proposal.

It looks like uh proposal 122 approves an additional appropriation of one point 276,809.

In the 26th budget of Office of Education Innovation State Grants and things.

You got the floor.

Uh good evening, counselor, um, Mr.

Chairman and committee members.

My name is Shana Cavassos.

I'm the director of the Office of Education Innovation, and I'm here to ask for consideration of a fiscal request for 156,809 dollars for a grant appropriation.

Um, a grant that OEI has already been awarded from the Department Indiana Department of Education.

Um, and then a 120,000 dollar request from our fund balance.

Um, I'll go into a little bit more detail about these.

The um the grant request is something that we received in December, and just this has been the soonest that we could come back to you for that appropriation.

Um, this grant is designed to support authorizer innovation activities.

Um, we really were given a lot of opportunity to decide what our office needed, um so we are using that to improve a variety of different systems and practices that we um undertake on behalf of schools, including looking at the performance frameworks that we use to measure schools against, um getting the benefit of some outside perspective and other experiences.

We continue to always seek to refine those and make sure that we are um staying up to date and really aware of best practice.

Um, we're also doing some work to better engage families and communities in communicating with us, and that kind of opened the door for the fund balance request to modernize our compliance platform.

Um we currently use a Salesforce-based platform that we have been told is no longer able to be updated.

Um, it was designed for us, kind of bespoke back in 2016.

Um, and just we've continued to have issues year over year, so this was an opportunity after diving into some of these different grant activities that we really wanted to get a uh get ahead of any potential issues, as this is the platform that our schools use to submit information to us to communicate with us in a variety of ways and it really forms kind of the um underpinning of a lot of the interactions that we have with them and so we need it to be reliable we need to be able to evaluate that information and receive things in a an efficient way.

None of this is new dollars and the 1560 will be reimbursed by the state just a little bit about us as perhaps you'll remember from previous budget sessions we are a self-funded agency through an administrative fee that we assess to schools every semester.

Those dollars can only be spent um per state statute on charter school authorizing and so for that reason we have um in our kind of conservative budgeting over the years maintained a um I think a healthy fund balance and so this effort would allow us to really improve a critical piece of our office's work but um still maintain all of the various reserves and um you know assurances that we need to continue to budget responsibly so I appreciate your consideration I'm happy to answer any questions.

Thank you.

Counselor Wells.

Thank you Mr.

Chairman thank you so much.

Is it Director Cavazos?

Yes thank you Director Cavasos I just want to be clear is are you staying with Salesforce then you're just getting a new product built or are you going to a different platform?

So we're we're exploring what some of those options look like part of the reason for the the size of the request is because um Salesforce development in general can be expensive.

So we are working really closely with ISA in exploring what would be necessary to improve the system that we have and we are also looking at if there are other vendors who are better positioned to help us without having to make that kind of investment.

So we've I was in a meeting actually the other day so we really are trying to align on what is the best use of dollars not only in for this one time request but also on an ongoing basis.

So it's going to depend on what we find out and we're in the process of receiving those proposals.

Okay.

Because there are some good resources in the Indiana Philanthropy alliance I think for an education-based initiative there are a lot of funders out there that would and and also product builders data board builders that can help with that communication but I'm happy to talk a little bit offline I've done some of these things in my day job with trying to communicate with a lot of people at the same time and track grant funds and things like that and then report back.

So but um just really thank you for your presentation tonight and here to support the charter school fund as well the grant by the state thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you counselor.

Sorry.

Thank you Mr Chair um just so I guess that I'm curious the so you're just at the exploration stage of what the new software might be is so you referenced you know this goes back to the sort of the inception of OEI and the early days of uh Indiana charter school authorization in that decade since have you talked to the other charter authorizers and is there has there been an emerged uh standard in all those years or does everybody every charter authorizer do their own thing um it depends uh there are existing vendors who do work specifically with charter schools and charter school authorizers and design software for the purpose of compliance platforms and and other similar efforts um and there are also authorizers just as you can imagine of a varying sizes and ability of resource who use you know Google Google drive.

So you kind of do see a spectrum um as you know we we have um you know a portfolio that requires that we I think are, and also a data system and security requirements that necessitate something a little more complex than than Google drive, and we're not really permitted to do that, of course.

So we are looking into some of the more um robust options to make sure that we have something that can accommodate the volume of information that we receive.

So part of this is trying to be smart about timing.

We've been having conversations with vendors.

Also, I've been working very closely with ISA to understand what our options might be to do development.

You have to forgive me not being kind of fluent in application development myself, but there are some options we could pursue because we have a some grant obligations that do require us to understand where this compliance platform is landing.

I wanted to do as much as I could to get ahead of it.

And if we do go with an existing vendor, which ISA would guide us through that that process as well, um, this would allow us to uh not have to renew our contract again next year with Salesforce, because there would be a little bit of just a phase out and transition into working with any new system.

So in I guess thank you for that.

The it in light of I guess what you're saying that and we are I think we're the largest, if not one of the largest uh charter authorizers in the state.

If we do create this uh custom solution, uh, is there an opportunity for other charter authorizers?

So I guess looking at under IPEC and now IPS exploring the possibility of becoming authorizers themselves, could we either share or could we host on their behalf?

Like could there be one server to instances because it as you're exploring, is that a possibility that we we s we set the standard for the state and let others use whatever we create, but obviously reimburse us.

That has not been something that we've explored.

I would say we are really kind of looking at what is best for our office today, um, if there are future conversations that happen within those different entities about best practice sharing or the ability to collaborate, we of course will be opening and have those conversations.

Um our Salesforce based platform has been outdated for a little while, and so really trying to get ahead of those those issues, and if there is more good that can be done, I'm always happy to work with the other authorizers to make sure that we can we can share those things amongst ourselves as a group.

Thank you.

Thank you.

President Lewis.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Thank you for your presentation and all the work that you do each and every day on behalf of our kiddos.

Two questions now.

Are we one of the larger authorizers in the state of Indiana?

Yes, I should know that.

Oh, okay.

Thank you for that.

I wasn't um aware of that.

Two, will any of these dollars go towards the newly formed IPAC to a supporting task?

Okay, thank you.

Councilor Barnes.

Thank you, Mr.

Chairman.

Um, just a quick question.

The grant um from the state that's you described as intended to help sort of keep you uh in tune with the industry and and um what's happening policy-wise around the country.

I've always viewed your office as the president just just pointed out, one of the largest ones, but also uh, in my view, one of the best ones.

And um there's long been a discussion about making uh ideally having uh limiting the authorizers from Marion County to Marion County entities, but that's neither here nor there.

My question is can you just sketch out what are some of the trends that are happening with authorizing?

Because authorizing is so important, no charter school is gonna be successful unless there's a sophisticated authorizer behind the scenes or paying detailed attention and making sure that the accountability structures are in place.

So, as there have been movement or uh new thinking and how the authorization process should work, I'm just curious about where the state of the of the charter authorization industry is.

How much time do you have?

Yeah, I know that's a big that's a big bite, but maybe you just give us a few little digital little advertisers.

Yeah, within the chairman within two minutes, yeah.

Um, so just like with education, um, our industry is also always evolving.

Uh, I'd say one reason we like to return to it is because as different metrics or ways of measuring or understanding how student data should be used, understanding how organizational data should be used, um, those things are changing too.

And so when we can go out and talk with other um other practitioners, other um experienced authorizers who are they're still working in that space or in other ways to kind of um help develop the entire industry, we can um always get better.

So there's not one thing, I guess, but um, knowing that some authorizing is shifting towards um what are both the ways that we can ensure that schools are being held accountable to the promises that they're making to our community, and also what are ways that authorizers can position to support them in whatever way their office is able to do that.

So we're always exploring what does that balance look like.

Um we are looking at from a you know from a financial standpoint.

Are there new ways to get a better understanding of how schools are performing financially?

Are there new things being tried in other states that we should be aware of?

Often we are finding that we do have a very solid um and high quality performance framework, but I'm never satisfied just to rest on that.

And so with some additional resources available from the state, I want to make sure that we are really leading in this area and setting a high standard, not just for Indiana, but for the entire country.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Any other questions or comments?

Seeing none.

Anyone from the audience would like to speak on this?

Seeing that, I understand a motion.

Move and second.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye, opposed, thank you.

Um nothing else on it.

If we don't see any else, we are adjourned.

This piece of woods.