The Kansas City Council held a business session on March 9, 2023, beginning at 8:15 PM UTC. The meeting included approval of previous minutes, budget presentations from the General Services, Law, and Finance departments, an update on the UNESCO Creative Cities of Music designation, and a motion to enter closed session.
Welcome to business session. Our first item is approval of minutes for business session of March 2nd, 2023. Is there a motion? So moved. Second. We're moved and seconded. All in favor indicate by saying aye. Aye. Aye. All opposed. Motion passes. Budget presentations. Our final budget presentations. We'll start with you instead of UNESCO. So come on up. Oh, okay. Good morning, Mayor. Um, good morning, members of the council. My name is Jolanda McKenzie. I'm director of General Services, and I will be talking to you today about our budget as submitted for fiscal year 24. To the right of me is my finance manager. Jeremy Jackson. And as we go through the presentation, we will kind of be paring off back and forth, and he'll help us help me in some of the information that we'll be sharing. I just want to say that the General Services Department assists city departments in achieving their public service missions by providing essential support services in areas of capital projects management, fleet services, facility operations, purchasing, technology, real estate safety and risk management. The organizational culture of General Service Department centers on customer service, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Through the combined efforts of professional and dedicated staff, general services strives to provide creative, innovative, and sensible solutions to effectively support city departments and the public that we serve. Our budget is currently 40.7 million as submitted. Before you are five of our key metrics, we have several for the department, but I thought that these would be good metrics to share with you today. An undertaking that we've started up again is the cybersecurity training. We're at about 94%. Our goal is to get 99%. That will be a continual training program that we'll roll out every year. In fleet, we've made quite a few changes. One of them is our electric vehicles, which I'm excited about. But we still have a mix of C and G in our fossil fuel vehicles. So our goal is to make sure that they are available to each of the departments so that they can continue their work. At this point, we are at about 94% of our fleet is available for our departments to use to complete their work. Our goal is 95%. Last year we're at about 64%. We've improved. We're at 70%. Our goal is 80%. We plan to reach the 80% by submitting a request in the new fiscal year to discuss what our lifecycle plan and program looks like and what those means are in order to replace our vehicles. General Services Department has about 218 positions in totality. That includes our internal service fund as well as our general service fund supported positions. We average 26.27% vacancy rate for our department. We are facing some unprecedented challenges in the workplace and workforce as our vacancy is almost one out of every three positions reaching that level that are vacant. Some of the challenges that we run into, we've run into is high turnover rate with our tenured employees. Um, about 28% of that turnover is due to retirement, and we're averaging about 20% turnover with new hires within two years. Other challenges are residency requirements, sometimes acts as a barrier to attracting our experienced candidates, um, budgeted vacancies in order to create salary savings and timeliness.