The Minneapolis Budget Committee convened to review the mayor's recommended 2026 budget from three city departments: the Office of Public Service, the Assessing Department, and the Arts and Cultural Affairs Department. Department heads presented their budgets, achievements, risks, and proposed changes, followed by questions from committee members.
Office of Public Service (OPS) Presentation by COO Margaret Anderson Kelleher:
Assessing Department Presentation by City Assessor Rebecca Malmquist:
Arts and Cultural Affairs Department Presentation by Director Ben Johnson:
Committee Questions and Responses:
Good morning. My name is Aisha Chuktai, and I'm the chair of the budget committee. I'm going to call to order our adjourned meeting for Tuesday, September 16th, 2025. Before we begin the meeting, I want to offer a friendly reminder to all members, staff, and the public that these meetings are broadcast live to enable greater public participation. These broadcasts include real-time captioning as a further method to increase the accessibility of our proceedings to the community. Therefore, all speakers need to be mindful of the rate of their speech so that our captioners can fully capture and transcribe all comments for the broadcast. We ask all speakers to moderate the speed and clarity of their comments. At this time, I'll ask the clerk to call the role so we can verify the presence of a quorum. Councilmember Payne is absent. Councilmember Wandsley is absent. Rainville. Present. Vita. Present. Ellison, absent. Osman, absent. Cashman, present. Jenkins, absent. Chavez. Present. Chowdhury. Present. Palmasano. Present. Vice Chair Koske. Present. Chair Chuktai. Present. There are eight members present. Let the record reflect that we have a quorum. I will also remind my colleagues that we will be using speaker management today, so please make sure to sign in. Colleagues, we have three presentations today related to the mayor's recommended 2026 budget from the Office of Public Service, the Assessing Department, and the Arts and Cultural Affairs Department. I'll now invite Margaret Anderson Kelleher, Office of Public Service, Chief Operations Officer, to join us and begin our first presentation. Welcome. Good morning, Madam Chair. Margaret Anderson Kelleher, City Operations Officer for the City of Minneapolis. And I will begin. This shows our structure committee members. Obviously, the reporting structure here is for me directly to the mayor, and then the number of departments below 17, which also includes, and we'll go over here to just show you the breadth of this. The Office of Public Service oversees the non-public safety departments in the city, all of them in the executive branch. The CEO and the deputies, and I will say we also include in our deputies the PW director for planning purposes and the civil rights director, who also report directly to me. That includes 2,700 employees of the little over 4,000 employees in the city of Minneapolis. The lines of service are clustered into areas that can uh foster cross collaboration between the different departments, which is very important. And uh each of these lines of service represent hundreds of employees underneath uh them. Then directly to our office, our office is organized in this way. So we have administrative support, uh, we have the DCO for communications and engagement, Laura Mellum, Deputy COO for Internal Affairs, Saray Garnett Hooley, and uh DCOO Brett Jelly Over Development and Health and Livability. We also have a number of people who work on special projects, coordination across the enterprise. So you would know them as uh folks like Mr. Cato, who has led a number of projects on our behalf, as well as uh Jessica Stone, who is the coordination person between a number of departments on the climate legacy initiative. Um I'm gonna keep moving here.