Welcome to business session.

First item is approval of minutes for business session of July 31, 2025.

Is there a motion?

It's all right.

They moved and seconded.

Moved by the mayor pro tem, seconded by Councilman Curls.

All right, all in favor, okay by saying aye.

Aye.

Aye.

All opposed.

Motion passes.

Our first item is the city auditor report.

The people's auditor, Mr.

Shaw.

Testing.

Honorable Mayor and members of the City Council, thank you for the opportunity to summarize and discuss the city communications audit with you all today.

Mr.

City Manager, thank you for the cooperation of you and your team throughout our process of gathering information and writing the report.

I'm here with two members of my audit team, Clint Pullham, who recently became the office's audit manager, bringing with him a wealth of experience from the state of Arizona, where he served in a similar role.

And Ben Fortney, our lead auditor for this report.

Ben joined us earlier this year after a decade working in the federal government.

We'd like to structure this presentation based on the flow of the report.

First, we'll review the audit objectives.

Second, we'll highlight the spotlight on successes.

And third, we'll discuss our findings and recommendations.

We'll leave time at the end for the city manager to discuss his response, which has been appended to the report, if he so chooses.

And of course, we've welcomed the opportunity to respond to your questions.

So if that works for you all, we'll move directly into highlighting the substance of the report.

As you are aware, the city auditor's office was directed to conduct a performance audit of the city communications office to assess its policies against local government best practices, including whether to decentralize some or all of city communications functions to departments and evaluate its policies with the city's values of transparency and accessibility.

With that in mind, we scope this audit to address those issues within the 90-day time frame allotted.

Let me start off by saying that we decided to add a section to our reports that highlights something positive.

That's what the spotlight on success or successes in this case is.

To that end, we first wanted to call your attention to the Office of Language Accessibility and the relatively rapid progress it has made to establish capacity to address citizen access to language services in response to an ordinance passed by council in 2024.

I want to point out that the emphasis here simply isn't on the nuts and bolts of upstarting an office and program from scratch.

It's also about effective governance, how this council manager form of government can work well to respond to citizen concerns.

The second success we wanted to highlight was how City Communications create uh created effective connections between the City of Kansas City and its citizens through targeted branding campaigns.

We know how important communications and branding are in the age of social media, influencers, AI, and the like.

Branding is crucial in both creating narratives that drive tourism, investment, and in showing how local government is responsive to its citizens.

It also helps us helps fill a void with positive narratives that otherwise could be filled with negative information.

So we wanted to emphasize the effort City Communications has placed on branding because of its importance and because of its effectiveness.

Moving on to the core of the report, the findings and recommendations.

We have three findings and three recommendations that resulted from this particular audit.

Our first finding was that previous city management leadership did not communicate to communications staff or the departments a new organizational structure that centralized decision making at the assistant city manager level.

When the previous communications director left his position in 2022, city management leadership did not replace him.

The former assistant city manager told us that she was neither the acting communications director nor had she explicitly designated anyone as such.

However, testimonial and documentary evidence suggested otherwise.

The former acting assistant acting acting assistant city manager made decisions and directed the actions of subordinates on communications related decisions.

Feedback to us suggested subordinates were confused about her role, their roles, and their autonomy to execute broad communication strategy within their purviews.

This lack of clear organizational leadership was disruptive and resulted in confused messaging, lack of strategic direction, low morale, and operational inefficiencies.

Many staff were fearful of reprisals and making mistakes.

The second finding that city communications does not have a comprehensive plan to guide its operations, messaging, and public engagements, focuses on deficiencies related to operational execution.

We noted in the report that city management leadership's decisions were ad hoc.

Decisions were reactive and unstructured, and managing people and processes appeared improvised.

Associated with this was a notable absence of policies and procedures to guide routine operations.

While operating without a plan offered latitude and flexibility for leadership, it undermined the ability of staff to perform efficiently and effectively internally and led to some confusion among external stakeholders as well.

City communications was not appropriately responsive to the media.

It did not always provide complete or timely information.

In some cases, that hampered the media's ability to inform the public, which we know is a key and critical component of effective governance that, among other things, ensures transparency and accountability.

The last issue we would like to point out with regard to this second finding is that city communications subordinated public information to public branding.

You'll recall that we highlighted public branding as a spotlight on success.