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 Monday, September 29th, 2025.

Before we begin our 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 will ask the clerk to call the role so we can verify the presence of a quorum.

Councilmember Payne is absent.

Councilmember Wandsley is absent.

Councilmember Rainville.

Rosen.

Councilmember Vita.

Present.

Councilmember Ellison is absent.

Osman is absent.

Councilmember Cashman present.

Councilmember Jenkins is absent.

Councilmember Chavez.

Present.

Councilmember Chowdry.

Present.

Councilmember Pamasano.

Present.

Vice Chair Koske is absent.

Chair Chugtai.

Present.

That is seven members present.

Let the record reflect that we have a quorum.

I'll also remind my colleagues that we will be using speaker management today.

So please make sure to sign in.

Today we have two presentations related to the mayor's recommended 2026 budget.

The first from civil rights and the second from our public works department.

As stated, Kayla McConandietta, I am the interim director of the Civil Rights Department and very happy to be here today to present the 2026 recommended budget.

So to start, this is where the civil rights department is in the overall city structure.

As you can see, we are a part of the Office of Public Service and report to the city operations officer Margaret Anderson Kelleher, who reports to the mayor.

This is a breakdown of all of the staff that are within the civil rights department.

I'll highlight, especially on this slide, that we've engaged in significant workforce restructure over the last year for a variety of reasons, with uh an intent to provide additional staff support and accountability for the work as well as centralize some of our work in our administration division.

Some of the highlights that I want to point out here on this slide are that we have a senior project manager position who reports to the department director that we have recently reclassified into a quality assurance and compliance manager, but because it has not yet been updated on our workforce roster, we wanted to be consistent.

Um, so that's our senior project manager.

And we're really excited about this position because it is going to provide an additional layer of compliance and oversight over the civil rights department specific compliance with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights Settlement Agreement and the paragraphs that we need to comply with therein, as well as provide uh quality assurance and compliance work across the entire department and all of our different divisions to ensure that we are adhering to our own internal operating procedures as well as keeping up with best practices across the country in this type of work.

I'll also highlight our manager of grants and community engagement.

One of the main key priorities of the department over the last year and into the coming years is to increase community engagement.

And so we've been able to centralize that work within the department and also have a staff person that's specifically focused on that.

We also implemented uh levels of supervision in our two larger of our divisions, which is our contract compliance division and our office of police conduct review.

So you'll see that we have a contract compliance supervisor within our contract compliance division, as well as three different supervisors in our Office of Police Conduct Review, which is our largest division, a policy and research coordinator, an intake supervisor, and an investigation supervisor over each of those different pots of work within that division.

I'll also highlight on this um overview in yellow, you'll see the three different boards and commissions that we support within the Civil Rights department, which is the community commission on police Oversight, the Civil Rights Commission, and the Workforce Advisory Committee.

Mission Goals and Priority Objectives of the Department.

So we had the exciting opportunity this year to engage in a rework or to develop new mission, vision, and values statements for the department.

We did this in collaboration across all of the leadership in the department as well as with input from staff and with some very helpful facilitation from our learning and development team in human resources.

And what we've come up with are as follows.

The mission statement for the department is that the department protects and advances human rights through enforcing civil rights protections with accountability and impartial investigations to empower community.

Our vision is as the people's investigator, we strive to eliminate civil rights violations in the city of Minneapolis by rooting ourselves in service, justice, and community, and working to remove systemic and institutional barriers that cause harm.

The values that we identified that best reflect the work of the department are integrity, equity, accountability, justice, and trust.

We've also identified a variety of priorities for the department, and they are to improve and standardize timelines, create document and align where possible standard operating procedures across the department, increase community engagement, which I had already mentioned, and refine and implement ordinances and policies that impact our work.

We also work to identify objectives in three different areas of our work investigations, education and engagement, and compliance, and I'll be touching on those objectives throughout the presentation.

Some key achievements to highlight for the Civil Rights Department over the last year.

One is that organizational restructure that I mentioned that really was quite extensive and better reflects, I think, the work that we are completing here in the Civil Rights Department.

We've made significant strides on hiring and retention.

We also have seen the passage of multiple ordinance amendments to ordinances that we enforce our civil rights ordinance, our community commission on police oversight ordinance, and our sick and safetime ordinance.

And we've had a lot of success in largely clearing the investigative backlog in the Office of Police Conduct Review for Police Misconduct Investigations, as well as continuing to meet the terms of the Minnesota Department of Human Rights Court Enforceable Settlement Agreement with multiple compliance submissions.

We've continued to provide support to the community commission on police oversight as well as the other boards and commissions that we support.

Some of the risks to the department that I'll highlight are changes at the federal level, and these are changes to funding to policy and to law.

Additionally, the department leadership is of course in transition, which can pose some uncertainty.

And then we're also implementing two new case management systems for our work, which is ultimately a very positive thing, but of course comes with some risks as well as we're doing that transfer over.

These are the different, a breakdown of the different objectives that we've come up with for each of our different kinds of pots of work that we do within the department.

We worked with our performance management and innovation department to come up with these.

The things that we're tracking to ensure that we're able to meet that objective is the number of complaints submitted, the case timelines that we're seeing, case outcomes, and total monetary settlement amounts across our divisions.

In the education and engagement area, our objective is to promote understanding of and engagement with civil rights issues and empower community to act when their rights are threatened or violated.

We're tracking in this area consultations, the number and type of community engagements that we are a part of, and the impact of those engagements on participants.

And then in the area of compliance, our objective is to ensure awareness of the city's civil rights related and civil rights enforced ordinances, including our civil rights ordinance, our workplace regulations ordinance, police conduct oversight ordinance, and city contract compliance ordinance to promote compliance with those laws.

To that end, we are tracking the percent of contracts that meet our minority business enterprise and women business enterprise commitments and compliance related to the settlement agreement terms.

You'll also see on this slide a QR code that can be scanned that will take you to a dashboard that details all of these different objectives that we have across all of our divisions and provides a variety of data that we're currently tracking.

I'll draw on that data and discuss it throughout this presentation as well.

Here you'll see a breakdown of the department's budget over the last couple of years, and then moving into the recommended budget in 2026.

As you can see, there is a budget decrease, and I'll discuss that throughout the presentation.

It is largely in the area of contractual services.

This is a breakdown of the budget based on division.

One thing that I want to highlight here, the big difference that you'll see is that the equity and engagement division is not included in the 2026 recommended budget, and that is because that division was dissolved in 2025 and therefore hasn't been budgeted moving forward.

As many of you know, the lion's share of the work of that division was facilitating the urban scholars program, and that program has now moved to our human resource department.

In the disillusion of this division, those that funding has been reallocated to other divisions throughout the department, namely our administration division and also some other ones.

But is all of those changes that you'll see on the slides as we go through them are budgetary net neutral for the department as a whole.

This is a summary of our FTEs in the Department of Civil Rights.

As you can see in 2024, we had 46.5.

In 2025, we had 47.5, and then in the 2026 recommended budget, we have 48.

And there's a breakdown in on this slide that explains that there was a 0.5 FTE that was added to the recommended budget, and this was through an administrative ad and it was offset by the department's non-personnel budget.

So again, it is a net neutral change.

This is the same thing with the 0.8 FTE, which moved from a special revenue fund to the general fund.

That was driven largely by just the duties of that position changing in such a way that it could no longer be on the special revenue fund.

And again, that is a net neutral change that was made within the department.

We currently have six vacancies of FTEs in our civil rights department, which is a vacancy rate of 8%.

We are actively hiring five of those six and really are hopeful that we will be fully staffed as of the end of the year or early in the new year.

Now I'm going to move into division updates, so updates on our budget broken down by each of the divisions within the department.

Starting with our administration division.

So our objective in the administration, we're responsible for providing process management, resource delegation, and program coordination in support of all the divisions within the department.

The administration provides leadership, guidance, and support to all divisions, ensures budgetary health, operational efficiency and effectiveness.

We also serve as the hub of the collective department effort around a variety of things, including community outreach and engagement, communications, contracting, and liaising with external agencies.

And some of the metrics of success that we're looking at are the number of community engagements the department is involved in, the impact of those engagements, training of staff across the department, and the general success on all objectives across all divisions within the department.

These are all the positions that are within the administration.

We have the department director and deputy director.

We have our senior project manager and manager of grants and community engagement, both of which are newer positions, and I discussed previously, but really key to the work of the department moving forward.

We also have an administrative assistant to the director, a business data analyst that will that reports to our senior project manager, and an administrative analyst too that reports to our manager of grants and community engagement.

Some key activities of our administration are our reimagined mission, vision, and values that I've already shared.

Also our strategic planning work for the department as a whole, community engagement, communications and media, contract management and staff development.

And I have a breakdown here of our work around community engagement.

As I've already put forward, we have a major goal in the department of increasing community engagement overall.

And we want to do that to promote understanding and engagement with civil rights issues and make sure that folks know where they can go if they're experiencing possible violations of their civil rights.

And what we're measuring here is the number of community engagements, trainings, and media appearances that the department has engaged in.

What you can see is in 2024, we engaged community at 123 different times or different occasions, but that number has already significantly increased for 2025, even though this number is only through the end of August of 2025.

So we have time for additional engagements before the end of this year.

So we are currently at 163 community engagements for this year, but we do have a target of hitting 185.

And then we want to increase that even more in 2026 to 190 community engagements.

I want to highlight the significant increases really tied to the effort of our manager of grants and community engagement and the fact that we have that position that really can focus on getting the department out there and making sure that our information is available and accessible to community.

We also want to measure whether our engagements are actually impactful.

Do people find them relevant and do people find them engaging?

Because that's how we know if they're going to continue to engage with us moving forward.

So to that end, we started sending out surveys after engagements to see what people thought and to get feedback so that we could potentially improve any of the work that we were doing in this area.

We do not have a percentage to report.

This is the percentage of individuals who report that engagements were engaging and relevant to them.

We don't have a number for 2024 because this is a new performance measure.

We began sending surveys out in March of this year, but so far we've received 89% of survey responses have indicated that engagements were engaging and relevant.

We want to continue to increase that to 95% by the end of this year and 95% again in 2026.

So I talked about all the different engagements that we've been involved in this year, so I wanted to highlight what some of those are.

We were present at the Juneteenth celebration, the community connections conference, we were at all of the open streets events, we were at Northeast Park Fest, we participated in Black Business Week.

We participated in six of North Point's free fresh food Fridays.

We were a part of the Trans Equity Summit and participated there, as well as collaborated with a variety of your offices on different outreach and engagement efforts and events.

We also supported our board and commission meetings, both their monthly meetings as an entire body as well as subcommittee meetings, recruitment and community engagement sessions as well.

We had a variety of media appearances.

We participated in interviews on Hmong Radio, La Raza Radio, Native Roots Radio, Somali TV.

We had a press conference when our labor standards enforcement division reached the very uh impressive and important milestone of more than two million dollars in wage recovered, wages recovered for workers since its inception, as well as participated in a press conference for the first felony conviction for wage theft in Henneban County.

We also issued a press release when our new civil rights protections as a part of the amendments to the civil rights ordinance went into effect on August 1st of this year.

We received 100,000 in one-time funding specifically for training investments for staff and commissioners in the 2025 budget and have used that funding to have staff and commissioners engage in a lot of different trainings, and we're really happy to report their ability to do so.

Some of those include, we've worked significantly with the National Association for Civilian Oversight, otherwise known as NACOL, to come in and do trainings both for our staff in the Office of Police Conduct Review, but also for our community commission on police oversight commissioners.

We also have staff and commissioners attending their upcoming conference, national conference.

We've sent staff to internal affairs investigations training, to mediation training, had staff take part in the employment law institute and the American Contract Compliance Association training institute.

We have staff who are attending the upcoming International Association of Official Civil Rights Agencies Conference, as well as staff attending an upcoming certified fraud examiner course.

This really has been key to provide staff the tools and the skills that they need to provide the best possible service to community who is reaching out to the Civil Rights Department for Services.

Moving next to our complaint investigations division.

This division is tasked with enforcing the city's civil rights ordinance and does this by receiving and investigating complaints of discrimination based on protected class.

As many of you know, a protected class generally is something about your identity that you cannot or should not be asked to change.

It includes things like race, religion, sex, national origin, disability, and the like.

And this division has jurisdiction to investigate discrimination in many different areas of life, including employment, housing, education, public services, and more.

This division also provides the staff support to the Civil Rights Commission and engages in community outreach across the city, specific to our civil rights ordinance.

Some of the metrics of success that we're tracking for this particular division are the volume of complaints received, the numbers of cases closed and their outcomes, efficient investigative timelines, total monetary settlement amounts, and non-monetary settlement terms that promote future compliance with our civil rights ordinance.

This is a breakdown of the positions within our complaint investigations division.

We have an associate director who leads this division, two intake coordinators, two complaint investigation officer ones, and two complaint investigation officer twos.

This is a breakdown of some of the data that we're tracking over the last few years in this division.

You'll see a breakdown of the complaints submitted, and in the last couple of years, we have seen an increase in the complaints submitted.

So in 2024, we received 421 complaints, and so far this year we've received 279.

Again, that's through the end of August of this year, so we expect those numbers to be similar to last year.

We also have a breakdown here of case outcomes.

Similarly, this is for 2025, this is through the end of August, and therefore our total case completion numbers.

I also expect to reach similar numbers as last year.

Monetary settlement totals.

So in this division cases often come are closed via a settlement agreement via mediation or conciliation.

And the total settlement numbers we've seen over the last few years were around or more than 200,000 dollars.

So far this year we're at 105,000, but do expect that to increase before the year is out.

We've also had cases where settlements were reached where there was a variety of non-monetary terms that were included in those settlement agreements.

And they include things like agreements to policy changes, to tools for future compliance, to training to prevent discrimination or other issues from happening in the future, as well as sometimes continued reporting to the department so that we can continue to monitor compliance with our civil rights ordinance.

One of our key goals in this division is to ensure that we do have efficient case timelines, and we've set an internal expectation of completing investigative work in cases within 150 days of that case being assigned to an investigator.

We're tracking the percentage of cases that are completed within that 150 days target, and in 2024, we were able to do that 66% of the time.

In 2025 through August, we are at 54%.

Again, a caveat that this is because it's through August.

And so that's why that percentage is lower now.

As you can see, we have a target of 70% of cases overall in 2025 that will be completed within that 150 days, and then we've increased that target to 75% in 2026 and are really going to prioritize and focus on that efficiency.

Some key accomplishments in our complaint investigations division.

Again, as I stated, we've closed 46 cases in this division up through the end of August and are really prioritizing that 150 day timeline.

Right now, the complaint investigations division maintains no backlog and no appealed cases, which go to our Civil Rights Commission review panel to take a look at, have been reversed by the Commission so far this year.

With the help, of course, of you all on the council, as well as the mayor's office and the Minneapolis Commission on Civil Rights, we have worked to update the civil rights ordinance, and those updates really are pretty substantial and innovative and exciting.

And they do now, our civil rights ordinance now includes three new protected classes, including housing status, justice impact status, and height and weight.

I can I'm very happy to report that we have also started to receive complaints on these bases.

So we're glad that the word is getting out there and folks are coming to us if they're feeling that their rights were violated in this area.

I will also highlight that this division is working hard to implement an outreach and engagement plan to get the word out about these protected classes.

This has included cultural media appearances.

We're currently working on internal and external learning sessions, and staff recently presented a Minnesota CLE continuing legal education course on the updates to our ordinance as well as other work of that division.

Moving next to our Office of Police Conduct Review.

The Office of Police Conduct Review is a neutral agency that investigates allegations of police misconduct that are made by members of the public.

And they provide the Minneapolis Police Department and City as a whole policing policy recommendations.

The metrics of success in this particular area are the timely clearance of misconduct cases in accordance with the settlement agreement, compliance with settlement agreement paragraphs, facilitation of community commission on police oversight, commission and committee meetings, as well as regularly scheduled review panels.

Review panels are made up of one sworn member of the Minneapolis police department as well as two members of the community commission on police oversight, and they review misconduct investigations that come out of the Office of Police Conduct Review to make recommendations on final outcomes to the chief of police.

These are all of the positions that are in the Office of Police Conduct Review.

One thing I really want to note here is this is a big part of the overall restructure to make sure that we had sufficient levels of supervision and staff support within this division, which is the largest within the department, and that includes our policy and research coordinator who supervises an administrative analyst too and a video analyst.

That group is really specifically focused on providing sufficient support to the community commission on police oversight and being responsive to their needs.

We have an intake supervisor who supervises a video analyst and three case investigators that do the intake side of our work in the Office of Police Conduct Review.

We have an investigation supervisor that supervises seven case investigators who are completing administrative investigations.

So those are our larger scale and more intensive investigations.

And then we also have a management analyst that focuses on monitoring the data that we're receiving and doing research work related to that, as well as tracking what's happening across other municipalities, especially those that are under court enforced reform work to ensure that we are building the most appropriate and responsive model of civilian oversight of law enforcement.

One of the key accomplishments of the Office of Police Conduct Review is largely clearing their investigative backlog.

So as of September 15th of this year, the intake and administrative investigative units have reviewed, evaluated, and investigated all but four of the 234 backlog complaints that were sitting with the Office of Police Conduct Review.

Those four remaining cases are expected to be completed by the end of this month.

So we're excited to be able to report, hopefully, very soon that that backlog is fully cleared.

Again, this is for investigative work.

These cases are not closed.

There are multiple additional steps in the process, and we always want to make sure that folks understand that, but we're really proud of the work that has been done on the investigative side on those cases.

We've also really wanted to prioritize preventing a backlog like this from developing in the future, and so to that end have really focused on staffing within this division to ensure that team members can continue regular assigned duties versus any sort of movement that needed to happen in an emergency response to an influx of cases or complaints, creating a stable team structure, which again goes to those levels of supervision and kind of different pots of work within the division to ensure that there's clear roles and responsibilities to continue moving the work forward, and by developing a better ability to triage and prioritize effectively to address emerging issues while continuing to do the day-to-day work of completing investigations.

I will note that on the dashboard, there is not as much data around our Office of Police Conduct Review.

We are currently converting to a new case management system and making sure that all of our data is 100% as accurate as can as can be, and so that will be available soon and we're actively working on it.

I do have an explanation here of the number of complaints that this division is receiving.

And so as you can see, we received 229 complaints in 2023, 250 complaints in 2024, and we are already at 248 complaints through the end of August of 2025.

So we expect that to, of course, still increase.

We hope that this increase in complaints received is a demonstration that we are having some success in rebuilding trust with community and having them know that we are a resource in the Civil Rights Department and the Office of Police Conduct Review to come to when they believe that they have experienced police misconduct.

Some other things to highlight for our Office of Police Conduct Review.

So we provide significant staff support to the community commission on police oversight.

That was a part of the reason that the policy and research unit was created, and they have facilitated a variety of work, including policy language refinement with our C CPO, as well as presenting a sexual misconduct policy that the CCPO has now recommended, the Minneapolis Police Department to move forward with.

Again, we continue that to expect that number to increase throughout the rest of the year, and are excited to be able to get more cases moving through that process to increase efficiency across the board.

Our staff have also supported the CCPO in public hearings on police policies.

I also want to highlight the compliance submissions for our Office of Police Conduct Review.

So these are specifically related to the Minnesota Department of Human Rights settlement agreement.

We have multiple paragraphs that specifically relate to the work of the Civil Rights Department and the Office of Police Conduct Review, as well as the Community Commission on Police Oversight.

So we did receive a letter of compliance in March of 2025 related to paragraph 338, which requires us to develop an outreach strategy for the Community Oversight Commission to appoint a diverse group of community members that represents a cross section of the Minneapolis community.

We also received a letter of partial compliance related to paragraph 339, which requires that the Office of Police Conduct Review provide sufficient staff support to provide the Community Oversight Commission with meaningful participatory oversight.

We do expect and hope to receive full compliance on paragraph 339 in the near future.

With that, I will turn it over to our interim deputy director Johnny Burns, who will present on the contract compliance division as well as our labor standards enforcement division.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good morning.

Those benches are hard.

Jeez.

I'll talk about contract compliance.

Um contract compliance actively monitors construction contractors that have contracts directly with the city of Minneapolis, over 175,000.

Those are construction, development, services, commodities, professional service, technical contracts.

We look out for small underutilized business program.

We look at low-income workers and businesses, and we also ensure workers are paid the prevailing wage on the projects.

We, as I said, we actively monitor those contracts, and also we include affirmative action, ensuring that no one discriminates while they're working on those projects, and that we include small businesses in the process.

Some of our metrics for success are the SUBP participation.

So we set goals, we approve goals, and then we monitor that those goals are being met.

I'll talk about that a little bit in a second.

And then identify any wage theft on contracts as well as misclassification underpayment to workers and uh talking to workers on site to ensure that their rights aren't being violated.

As you can see with the contract compliance division, we have uh three entry-level compliance officers, which is managed by a compliance supervisor as uh director McConadier talked about.

We converted a position that was a senior level position into a compliance supervisor, which actually helped a lot and has helped a lot streamline the workflow uh training, project timelines, uh has been very helpful to us.

So we still have four senior compliance officers and also the weight step investigator, which was new to our division in 2024, uh that's been very uh important to contract compliance also and to the city.

Currently, uh we're monitoring, actively monitoring.

Uh, as you can see there, I don't want to report all the numbers there, but there's um a lot of contracts that we're monitoring over um 400, 500 uh thousand dollars, a half a uh half a billion dollars, I should say, of contracts.

And uh if you look at the chart there, those are the contracts that it tells you how much participation we're getting on those contracts from minority and women-owned businesses, and as it relates to the overall goal.

So 79% of the overall goal for uh MBE or for women-owned businesses is being utilized, and 73 percent for minority businesses are being utilized.

There's two stages to the utilization of contracts.

One is that the goal is either uh met or they show good faith efforts on the contract, and two is that the companies that they tell us they're going to utilize are actually utilized.

So these are if a company decides not to use a small business, they have to have a legitimate reason and they have to come to us for what's called a deviation from the contract.

And if they don't come to us, there's a penalty for that, and we've engaged contractors with penalties also, and uh ensuring that they must utilize those companies that they tell us they're going to.

Sometimes there is also a change in the contract, the city decides not to do something on a contract, remove some work, or there's less quantities of something that also can impact the uh subcontractors' ability to do work also.

So through August of uh 2025, we have we also do certification of small businesses.

So we've certified 22 small businesses in the Minnesota Unified Certification Program.

We've uh approved over 220 uh affirmative action plans again that's saying to contractors you will not discriminate on uh city of uh Minneapolis contract, and we've done 38 uh wage theft investigations and received over 104,000 in payments to workers.

Now, as I told you before, that waste theft investigator position came in on early 2024, and as you can see from that chart, the trending of those investigations have gone up since then, and we only see more investigations.

Our WASTEF investigators out there talking to workers, we're reviewing those payrolls when they come in.

If there are some anomalies, we ask for additional information uh through ordinance, and we're making sure that contractors abiding by their commitments to our contracts.

Now I'll talk a little bit about our labor standards and enforcement division.

The division investigates reported payroll and sick time violations to resolve disputes and demand back wages for workers and demands owed to workers, and we monitor ongoing compliance with any agreement that's made.

Now, this is not to be confused with contract compliance, which has we look at wage theft for contractors who do business with the city.

Labor Standards Enforcement Division monitors uh contractors who have, employers, I'm sorry, within the city.

So a little different.

They also look at when you look at the metrics for success for the division, uh, the volume of complaints received and successful successfully reviewed and resolved, uh, settlement agreements also, dollars collected and workers affected, and cost of taste is provided and compliance monitor.

A lot of outreach uh with that division, a lot of training with that division of employers and employees across the city.

As you can see there, four investigators, two uh entry-level investigators, and two senior investigators, as well as an intake coordinator uh that does the work of the division.

In 2024, there was 163 cases closed, and they've collected over a half a million dollars, half a million dollars and impacting over 1,300 workers.

And to date, in 2025, there's they've closed over 140 cases and collected over $300,000 in back wages and damages for workers.

In 2025 also, we're monitoring 44 settlement agreements impacting over 2,500 workers.

This includes training and or policy changes.

And again, the outreach with 25, 297 technical assistant consultations for employers between 2024 and 2025.

And also, the biggest deal is uh the passage of the sick and safe time ordinance and the amendments, and getting those signed, uh so that was that was a big deal for us, um, I think, as the city as a whole, to get that approved.

Some of the metrics we have, some of the key uh remedies that we have is remedying past and present future violations, as you can see from the chart there, that the cases are probably on uh really on pace with uh cases from last year, is either reaching the settlement agreement or uh violations found or no jurisdiction or sometimes we uh have to train employers, do some informal mediation, but any time we have contact with people, there's some type of um final adjudication to what happened with the case.

And then in our cases in 2024, there was over 162 cases.

We're at 140 right now through August, so we're on pace to meet that, and I think we're really on pace to meet that 170 target case for um cases, and then in 2026, we're gonna increase that another to 180 cases.

So I think we can meet that too.

And I'll turn it back over to Director McConnell.

Thank you.

As you've seen throughout the presentation, there is a reduction in the civil rights um recommended budget for 2026, and that is to our labor standards co-enforcement funding.

That reduction um is recommended to be approximately 349,000, and with that reduction, approximately 309,000 will remain in the department budget to complete this work.

I want to highlight that we truly value and appreciate the work of our co-enforcement partners as well as our partnership with them.

Uh last this past year we piloted performance-based contracting for our co-enforcement contract, and so have set very specific um targets for different activities within this work, and we are very committed to working with our co-enforcement partners to ensure that we make reasonable and mutually agreeable adjustments to those targets based on any reduction in funding.

And with that, thank you so much for your attention, and I will stand for any questions that you may have.

Thank you for your presentation, director colleagues.

Are there any questions?

And as I'm seeing council members jump into queue, I will note that we have been joined in this committee meeting by council member Jenkins.

Um with that, I will first recognize council member Cashman, followed by Council Member Palmasano.

We've got four speakers in queue so far.

Thank you, Chair Chugtai.

Thank you, Director.

Um, trying to understand this cut that you just outlined.

So, what was the rationale behind cutting reducing funding for labor standards co-enforcement, especially since the uh public hearing that we had most recently was workers and advocates talking about the real the real impact of this and the real need for this funding?

Chair Chugtai, council members, council member Cashman, thank you for the question.

Um we had a budget reduction target just as any other um department did across the city.

Um, and so we really had to take a look at our budget as a whole.

Um, the vast majority of the civil rights department budget pays for our staff.

Um, and as I talked about, we've done an extensive workforce um overhaul and restructure to ensure that each of our FTEs truly um is necessary to enforce the civil rights ordinances we are tasked with enforce with enforcing, and that is why we needed to identify programmatic funding that we could come cut from.

So that is the rationale um for the reduction to co-enforcement funding.

And then what would be the impact on service delivery of reducing the capacity of labor uh standards co-enforcement?

Chair Chugtai, council members, thank you for the question.

Councilmember Cashman.

Uh, the we don't yet know exactly what the impact would necessarily be, but as I said, we piloted um performance-based contracting in this contract.

So we do have very specific targets, and we are committed to working with our co-enforcement partners to make reasonable adjustments to those targets.

So I think it's things like um amount of community outreach, um, you know, trainings that are completed, amount of navigation services that are provided to workers.

So we'll make sure to work with our partners and make sure we come up with uh a reasonable course forward of what those expectations should be.

Okay.

So there would be a reduction in all of that in trainings in engagement and in enforcement of labor violations.

I do believe that would be a reasonable expectation, yes.

Okay.

And then uh last question here.

What's driving the increase in the contract compliance cases in the last couple of years?

Is that just the fact that you've brought on new staff that's able to handle it, and therefore the case count has just gone up?

So we established uh wage theft investigator position in 2024, and so we that was the first time we've ever had an investigator in that division that can solely focus on investigating anomalies that we find when we're doing active monitoring on city contracts, and so we just have had increased capacity to be able to focus on that.

Um, as a deputy interim deputy director Burns noted, um, this individual goes out to work sites, interviews workers, really tries to identify any sort of issues that are present, and so we just have been able to identify uh more instances that require investigation and then those complete those investigations and ensure that workers are made whole when that's um the necessary outcome of an investigation.

Okay, thank you, Chair.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next, I'll recognize Councilmember Paul Musano, followed by Councilmember Chowdry.

Thank you.

Interim Director McConnell.

I'd like to thank you for always stepping up through a couple leadership transitions here, taking on new and additional duties, and really stabilizing the department.

Your own consistent presence and institutional knowledge is really um helping to hold things together in times of uncertainty, and I appreciate it.

Also, congratulations on some of your achievements.

I see them here, especially clearing the police conduct review backlog.

This is really key for successful response to the settlement agreement and consent decree, and I'm glad that you're prioritizing it.

Thanks.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

Um next, I'll recognize Councilmember Chowdhury, followed by Councilmember Vita.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you so much, Director, for your presentation, and thank you to everyone in the Civil Rights Department for their work.

Um I really see this presentation as an example of forward moving progress.

Um, I was really um impressed to see so much of the backlog reduced, and I'm interested to learn more about uh what's going to be done in the future to prevent future backlogs.

I think that's a very worthy goal to set, and I look forward to seeing that come to fruition in the next year.

Really exciting policy work that's being implemented in the civil rights department too.

Um it's heartening to see uh the expansion to housing uh housing impacted folks, justice impacted folks, heightened weight, and see more complaints come in, because it indicates that there's a greater need.

Um I really see the civil rights department as a department that is the arbiters of protection, justice, a place where people who feel marginalized or are marginalized in our city can come.

Um there's been a couple of cases that I've kind of pushed towards your department in my first two years as a council member, and the response has been really, really great.

Um, and it's very very widely known that we're in a moment where uh we're not in a country that's becoming more equitable and more equal.

It feels like it's the opposite.

Um there's further growth of disparities almost actually intentionally, and so the work of the civil rights department is really really important for the resiliency of our city, and I want to see this department grow into the future.

I think it needs to grow in order to continue to do the current uh workload that's robust, and we've had conversations and um different different parts of what civil rights does in terms of questions of capacity and the need for more capacity.

So even if it's not within this budget cycle, it's something that I'm really thinking about looking into the future.

Um so I just wanted to make those comments before I made some questions.

And again, just thank you, all of you that are working really hard in the department.

We really see it and our constituents really feel it too.

Like I get that feedback on the things that they've reached out about and connected on.

Um my question is about the reduction to co-enforcement.

Um, the first question that I have is how much funding without this funding is currently left for co-enforcement next year.

Chair Chucktag, Council members, thank you, Councilmember Chowdhury for the question.

Approximately $39,000 remains for co-enforcement work.

And is that one time or ongoing?

That is ongoing.

That's ongoing.

Okay, great.

And then I um I think I heard you mention something about uh figuring out internally how to kind of bridge the gap of losing this funding for co-enforcement.

How are you as the department director kind of thinking through um what can be mitigated internally without this funding?

Chair Chugtai, uh Councilmember Chowdhury, thank you for the question.

Um the main thing that we've identified is of course working with our co-enforcement partners to ensure that the targets moving forward um are reasonable based on the funding for this work, but additionally, we have prioritized community engagement and outreach generally in the department and would plan to focus that specifically on our labor standards enforcement related work to attempt to mitigate um some of the changes that would happen with reduced funding for co-enforcement.

And then I know that the additional ongoing funding happened just this last budget cycle.

I was uh co-author of that funding with a couple of my colleagues up here.

Um what was the impact of the additional funding that the department received and how did that show up in that work?

Uh Chair Chugtag, Councilmember Chowdhury, thank you for the question.

Um I would say at this point in time it's hard to quantify that fully just because it's only um we're only tracking through the end of August of this year.

Um but as I said, we did pilot uh performance-based contracting, and so we did want to um align that funding um in 2025 with the services that were going to be performed with that funding.

Um, and we're had very, I think, um, reasonable but also increased targets um for work, so increased hours that are logged by co-enforcement partners, increased outreach events and training, and increased navigation services that were responsive to that increase in funding.

And my last question is, um, how many how many specific to wage theft cases have you seen this last year in the departments worked on?

Chair Chugtai, Councilmember Chowdhury, thank you for the question.

I don't have that number off the top of my head, so I can follow up with a staff memo with that number.

Thank you.

That's perfect.

All right, those are all my questions, Chair.

Awesome, thank you.

And next I'll recognize Councilmember Vita.

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you so much, Director.

This this has been a really awesome Monday morning presentation.

You all have done some wonderful work.

The department, this department has been quite frustrating for me as a council member because I get a lot of questions about some of the things happening in civil rights, and over the years, I've just I've just said we're working on it.

And like we've worked on it.

You all have worked on it.

You've done a fantastic job to be down to four cases this month, having come from what was it like 234 or something like that that that we've been talking to people for for at least three years, given that same number and saying it's coming down, it's they're working on it and and to really be there now and have it down to four cases and be thinking about how are we gonna prevent this from happening in the future just feels really good.

You've done an amazing job, the entire department.

I know that direct yes, clap.

I see clap, good job.

You have done a fantastic job.

I know Director Phillips has moved on.

I I shared with her also that I thought her leadership just brought in this this power of getting things done and and really um listening to community.

I've enjoyed seeing you all out at community events.

I've never seen that before.

It's good to introduce you all to community and make people feel safe about some of the issues that um civil rights work on.

You know, I know when they see you at outreach events like Juneteenth or just at a local church, or you know, staff out at the neighborhood park talking to folks about what the civil rights department does, that bridges a gap for folks that I represent for sure.

And you know, everyone.

There's so many things happening in our communities that um could be violations of civil rights or that people have questions and concerns about, and to have folks out in community saying, here's who we are, you can talk to us.

That means a lot.

And so I really love the direction the department is going in.

I love how you've embraced um that being seen in community is a big part of how folks access this department.

So thank you all so so very much.

I mean that every single person in this department deserves huge big ups because I know it's been a labor to get here, and you all have been through it.

Rather, it's budget or turnover, and like so much staff turnover has happened in my time here.

Some of you have stuck with us this whole way, some of you are newer, and and I love it.

I really do.

I just appreciate this um this presentation so much.

I came in in a good mood, and this is keeping me in the good mood for the day.

So thank you all so much for this.

I do have one question though, because I've been asked this a lot recently based on um some of the public hearing the the public hearing we've had.

What is it?

Have you all explored what it look like to bring in um the work that like say say tool is doing around rage wage recovery in-house?

Like what does it look like to have?

I know you had a chart up with some folks who work in that department, but what does it look like to fully have that work in-house at the city of Minneapolis?

Chair Chugtai, Councilmember Vita.

Um, I would not say that we've done extensive work to look at that, so I wouldn't be ready or comfortable to answer that question at this point.

Um, I will say that the department certainly um values the the partnership with a community organization that is in a different non-government location and is accessible in a different way.

Uh so we have not done extensive work to take a look at that.

So is there an RFP process or like how do how when does that come back up again?

And how does that happen for other organizations that may be interested in co-enforcement work?

Chair Chugtai, Council Member Vita, thank you for the question.

Yes, there was an RFP process.

We just did one um early this year for this um co-enforcement contract.

Um off the top of my head, I don't have the date that that contract goes to, but I certainly could follow up in a staff memo uh and provide the date when that contract expires.

Okay, thank you so much.

That's all for me.

Clerks, did we note that that staff follow-up around um expiration of the current uh co-enforcement contracts?

Wonderful, thank you.

Um, thank you so much for coming in to present your your budget today.

Um, I will just say I I really appreciate I'm I know you were aware there were a lot of questions um about the co-enforcement um budget being cut in half a little bit more than that.

Um so I I just really appreciate your your honesty um about the impact that we'll have and I I can imagine that's a really difficult um thing to do and and so want to thank you for that.

So um with that we will um we will say thank you to the civil rights department.

You are you're thank you, you're done for the day.

Um, and I will ask the clerks to file that presentation.

Um, and next up we have our presentation from the public works department.

For that, I will invite Tim Sexton, our public works director, to join us and begin that presentation.

Welcome, Director.

Thank you, Chair.

If you'll just hold on one second.

Okay.

All right, just in time delivery.

Thank you, Annis.

Um, good morning, Chair Chugtag, Council members.

My name is Tim Sexton, I serve as Director of Public Works.

Thank you for the opportunity to share an overview of our department and the 2026 budget proposal today.

As shown, Public Works is part of the Office of Public Service and reports directly to the City Operations Officer.

Pull this up here.

There we go.

Okay.

So it's important to public works that we take opportunities like this one to highlight our team members who deliver the everyday core services our cities the city depends on.

Many of these jobs are difficult and can be physically and mentally demanding, involving crawling through sewer pipes, plowing snow in the middle of the night and during snowstorms, handling heavy trash and recycling cool carts in the cold, heat, rain, and snow.

One way we're celebrating our team is through our faces of public works interviews.

The slide shows James Landsberger, the department's equipment and training supervisor who works across divisions to reinforce our safety culture and help ensure our staff have the proper safety equipment and training to complete their work and come home safely to their families at the end of the night.

So the public works department makes up almost a quarter of the total city workforce, spread across nine divisions, who all share the mission of providing critical city services that contribute to public safety, economic vitality, and neighborhood uh livability in their own ways.

Our nine divisions are loosely grouped across the three business lines.

However, staff routinely collaborate across divisions.

You can show shown here, you can see our division breakdown and our FTE counts.

The administration division largely supports department and citywide services.

For example, workforce training is led by admin, and vehicle purchases and maintenance are led by our fleet division.

The utility business line includes solid waste and recycling, surface water and sewers, and water treatment and distribution.

They're mostly funded through utility fees, and their work ties back to those utility services.

Finally, the transportation business line includes all things transportation, from the transportation action plan to building bridges and plowing snow.

Our goal is to operate as efficiently as possible.

One example of that is as the largest city department, we have just one deputy director who also serves as city engineer, and that position is currently filled by Jenny Hag Jennifer Hagger.

Hager, excuse me.

Public Works currently has uh 1,061 positions funded through a combination of general fund and enterprise funds.

There are another 213 positions funded through the city's capital construction program that includes positions across the utility and transportation business lines for a total of around 1,275 positions.

Our primary mission in public works is to be effective stewards of public infrastructure and provide core city services that promote safety, economic vitality, and livability across the city, with our highest level goals being to provide a high performing workforce that reflects the diversity of the city, reliably provide affordable utility services, and develop a safe multimodal transportation system that is accessible to all residents and visitors.

The next three slides are small, a small sample of accomplishments in public works since last year.

We've divided these by people, which focuses on our workforce projects that relate back to capital investments and partnerships, since so much of what we do can only be accomplished through collaboration with internal and external partners.

Just a couple of items here that call out.

The first being the partner in excellence award.

Just this summer, uh Goodwill Easter SEALs of Minnesota recognized public works with their partner excellence award.

Yeah.

I think your team'm just trying to get your attention to move.

Am I not advancing the slides?

No, thank you.

Yeah.

So excited.

I just thought all right.

It's all good.

Thanks.

I think we're I think we're okay without going back through those.

Um but anyway, this the Partner Excellence Award is a collaboration, collaboration with the Father project that we're really proud of.

This is a program that supports fathers in overcoming barriers to employment and helping them achieve family and financial stability.

Another one that just to call out that didn't get a lot of uh notice, but we're extremely proud of General Foreman Damon Troll who was awarded the Citizens Life Saving Award.

Um Damon noticed a crash on the roadside, jumped out of his work truck, fashioned a tourniquet with using a belt to stop the bleeding, and then stayed with the person until the medics arrived.

And not only that, he returned to work pouring concrete on First Avenue right afterwards without telling anyone.

So this is just I think an example of sort of the humble heroics that many of our staff perform every day.

On our recruitment side this year, it's been a banner year across the division with over 60 new trainees hired, uh 60 new trainees, service worker ones and twos, and water distribution operators uh hired this year alone.

We also had almost 50 interns and urban scholars.

Um, some of you had the chance to meet them on the community cleanups, but we're really proud of this work to help people recognize the city as an employer of choice, whether it's with public works or other departments within the city.

Um a couple projects to highlight include the Nicolette Bridge project over Mini Haha Creek.

Um this one is just an exercise in persistence.

Um we were awarded a 35 million dollar bridge grant uh from the federal government.

As people know, a lot is a lot of uncertainty at the federal level.

Um, but we were able to get everything that needed to be done by the end of this month done to receive that $35 million grant.

Um, not without a ton of effort from uh public works and the city attorney's office.

So really grateful for that.

Hennepin Avenue South should be should be ready and to open up in November.

Another achievement we're excited about.

Um finally led service lines.

Uh you know, we've we're on track to replace uh as many as 10 led service lines every workday in 2025.

Um this is a huge effort as there are over 38,000 led service lines in Minneapolis.

Um and the goal of the state is to replace all of those by 2033.

And I guess one last thing is just on the copper wire theft.

I know that's an important topic for many of you.

Um, and over 22 miles of wire theft have been repaired this year alone, with over 580 lights relit this far into the year.

So we're gonna keep going to partnerships.

Um of our most exciting work uh is really done through partnerships, whether that's other city departments, working with city leaders, engaging with the community, county, state, regional partner agencies.

Uh just a few highlights include um the bike and transit to work day in coordination with uh Metro Transit and Move Minneapolis, uh traffic traffic safety camera pilot done in collaboration with legislators who helped us make that pilot a reality.

Um the NACTO, the National Association of City Transportation Officials, um this is the premier conference for transportation city transportation officials in the country.

Uh our application focused on partnerships with the city of St.

Paul, some counties, Mindot, and private and philanthropy partners.

Um we beat out a whole host of uh very competitive other city applications.

You can read the rest of those, but uh a lot of I think the key here is that um the work we do frequently involves others, which does add to the time that things take, um, but also adds to the quality of the outcomes.

In terms of big picture risks that we see coming this year and into the future, um, we're generally thinking of these risks in terms of trade-offs.

Um, so inflation and rising costs continue to be a challenge uh related to labor, construction materials, electrical components, um, continue to outpace funding available.

Just as some examples, signals and street lights are twice what they used to cost.

Um, you know, going from 200,000 in 2019 to 400,000 today to replace one traffic signal.

General construction material costs also continue to increase faster than other inflation, increasing over 15% since 2022 for things like concrete and asphalt.

On the staffing side, you know, staffing is always going to be a challenge, but I think what we we wanted to note is the upcoming loss of institutional knowledge.

We have over 282 employees in public works who are retirement eligible.

That's over 22% of our total workforce.

So that is a very real risk.

Many of these people have decades of knowledge that helps us do our work more safe, more efficient, and more effectively.

Supply chain, some of you experience this in terms of the wire theft.

We had an order for six miles of aluminum water or wire that was canceled this year due to tariff disruptions that slowed down our streetlight replacement work for this fall.

Federal funding uncertainty, I won't dwell on that.

I think people are aware of some of those challenges, but that is tens of millions of dollars of grants are at risk.

And it's hard to say with certainty how we mitigate that because there's so much uncertainty at the federal level.

But we continue to put our heads down and do as much, do the work the best we can to get those grants agreements signed and the funding continuing to come to the city.

Copper wire theft remains a risk, but I think we have seen a slowdown this year, which is a good thing, and that's due to a lot of the mitigating work that our staff have done to reduce the appeal of selling that wire along with potentially some benefit from the state law changes.

And then sort of bigger, more like big picture risks, have to do with collaborating with some of our partners.

One in particular with Hennepin County was given a lot of new transportation money by the state.

Those projects that they fund within the city require a city match.

And so we're continuing to work with them to sort of adjust those expectations.

Other expectations that continue to change though is on our projects.

Minneapolis is really recognized nationally as a leader in multimodal transportation.

That is not without effort and cost, though.

So our projects, what used to be a simple pavement overlay, is now you know we're adding ramps, signals, green storm water infrastructure, all the things that are important to our city, but they do take more time and they cost more money.

And then overall, just aging infrastructure.

Many of you unfortunately had to have had to experience some of the outcomes of an older infrastructure system in the last year that has costs to us, to community, and can create major disruptions in the city.

Alright, so overall the way we track our performance, though, we have 16 categories with 54 visualizations on our outcomes Minneapolis dashboard, and actually 64 unique metrics that we use.

We're continuing to refine these though.

I think even though we are a large department, it can be hard to manage 64 plus performance metrics.

But we can talk more about that if you'd like, but I'm gonna keep moving otherwise.

So given that we have so much going on in the department, we continue to work on a new strategic plan that we started this summer, and we'll be wrapping up later on this calendar year.

But the goal is to really say we've got all these metrics, we have plans like our transportation action plan with hundreds of actions in them.

How do we boil that down so that our staff can really focus on what's important and make sure that we're all kind of rowing in the same direction in the short term, especially to identify what are those key things we should be focusing our effort, our energy, and our resources on.

And we have three key areas of safety, equity, and climate that we're focusing on.

That draft is in sort of its final draft, excuse me, that plan is in its final draft stage, and we're hoping again to finish that in the calendar year.

Here are three examples, though, of the types of measures that we do feel like are important to capture and drive some of the work that we do.

Worker safety was always going to be our top priority.

Um we're really happy to report a trend towards fewer injuries, even though we won't be satisfied until we hit to zero.

We really credit our progress towards a culture of safety instilled by many of our leaders here today, and increased investment in safety training from people like James Landsberger, who you saw highlighted on that first slide.

In terms of community response, we are proud of our response time to 311.

The numbers here show continued excellence in this area by staff throughout the department.

That said, we're not perfect and sometimes exceed expected response times.

However, for some perspective, since 2024, public works has received over 62,000 311 inquiries.

So the fact that we are uh actually exceeding our service level performance goals, I think really is credit to all the people throughout the department who respond to those and really prioritize constituent and resident sort of responses.

And you know, we have a real role to play in reducing the city's contribution to carbon pollution.

Well, largest impacts are going to be from how we design and operate our infrastructure systems.

Electrifying the city fleet is one area where we have direct control.

We continue to make progress, but that work is non-linear linear.

We're overcoming supply chain challenges, changes to sort of where people are located within the city, and changes to funding and rebates for things like electric vehicles and electric vehicle chargers.

That said, we continue to make solid progress.

Um, and our fleet division.

Uh, this is their really one of their number one priorities.

All right, so to the expenses, um the proposed budget for public works in 2026 is just over 486 million dollars, of which uh just around 74 million comes from the general fund.

Um, and we're actually proposing an overall decrease to that in 2026 by 550,000.

The other, the remainder is uh largely from enterprise funds that are paid directly through utility fees, with a small amount then also being around from internal service funds for things like fleet and parking.

The largest overall budget that we're seeing for 2026, uh it comes from salaries and wages.

Um that's projected to be 11.1 million dollars or proposed to be.

Um we have 14 bargaining units within public works, and about 60 percent of those increases come from the 363 labor agreement for wage increases for public service workers.

These are the folks who are out there in the field plowing the snow, fixing the roads, um, doing that that difficult work.

The remaining increases about 41% come from AFSME, MPEA, and professional engineers.

On the operating expense side, uh we're proposing an increase of 4.5 million.

These are mostly from increases to the Met Council to treat our sewage.

Those costs continue to increase every year, and we don't have control over what Met Council charges us, but we do need to make sure that that water continues to be treated.

Contractual services are up about 4 million dollars.

Of those, 3 million comes from fixed internal charges for things like IT, general fund overhead, rents, and fleet.

So this is the same information just broken down by division.

We'll discuss more of those in the coming slides.

Okay, so in terms of our FTEs, we currently have 138 vacancies in public works, so that's about 10% of the total public works workforce, which is right around 1,300.

Um, and that includes all of our capital funded employees as well as general fund and utility or enterprise funds.

Majority of our vacancies are in those enterprise funded positions.

But all of our vacancies fall into three real categories.

One thing that we're really proud of in public works is we do we use details a lot, which is like a temporary filling up a position.

For example, right now, the deputy director and city engineer is being is a temporary or interim fill from Jenny Hager, which led to multiple other backfill temporary fills behind her.

This gives an opportunity for internal staff to explore the position and learn more about the new responsibilities before we competitively fill those roles.

Other vacancies include outside trades.

So excuse me, we fill with outside trades and temporary fills from people outside the department.

So, for example, we have about 120 of those 138 positions are currently filled through outside trades.

These are represented folks who are able to come in and work on as almost like a contract basis to meet the needs while if we're having trouble filling a position or while we're trying to do some of our larger hiring processes.

That we hold for trainees to move into after they complete their training for one year.

And we expect those service service worker vacancies will be filled through our spring recruitment, and applications open for that starting November 1st.

Okay.

Going into the specific divisions, starting with the administration.

The administration division has 16 people divided into four business units who lead recruitment, training, finance, and HR functions for the department, along with several several department-wide initiatives like intergovernmental relations and outcomes Minneapolis reporting.

Public works team has been instrumental in connecting program participants with career opportunities at public works, helping to build a more inclusive and equitable city workforce.

Jennifer Swanson serves as director of business administration.

Or admin.

Admin has prioritized efforts to improve worker safety and increase workforce diversity, especially bringing on more BIPOC and female job applicants.

The graph on the right shows steady progress being made towards a target of at least 40% BIPOC employees to better reflect overall city demographics.

Given the size of the public works workforce, we are a major driver of the city's overall progress towards workforce diversity goals.

And as credit to some of our admin staff, as of this year-to-date reporting, we've actually achieved that overall goal of at least 40%, but we continue to make strides to go beyond that.

Fringe benefits, excuse me.

Okay.

Transportation maintenance and repair.

These are the folks plowing the streets, fixing the potholes, doing the work that's shown in the pictures here.

But it's not just that.

So TMR has 270, 217 people divided into five business units bridge, ramps, streets, paving, and special service districts.

So not only do they do that maintenance, they are our in-house construction company, right?

That is doing the work, building building projects, making sure that we have that expertise within the city to build and repair some of those really challenging projects, not just contract that work out.

TM and I focuses on maintenance and repair throughout the city and evaluates their performance based on reactive work in response to complaints and concerns and proactive or preventative maintenance to cost effectively extend the life of transportation assets through efforts like pavement resurfacing.

TM and R performs summer and winter winter maintenance like street sweeping and snow plowing, runs a construction crew that builds and repairs streets, sidewalks, alleys, and bridges, and they're frequent collaborator collaborators with other divisions, departments, and external partners when operation support is needed around the city.

Joe Palman serves as transportation maintenance and repair division director.

One example of a metric of success for TMNR is response time to pothole complaints as shown on the graph to the right.

The blue bar shows the number of complaints reported through 311, and the green line shows the percent of complaints resolved within 12 days.

Data is year to date through September 15th.

Overall for TMNR, an increase of 2.6 million or 4.2% is proposed.

Again, similar theme, these are driven almost entirely by increased staffing wage and fringe costs.

In addition to that increase, though, I think it is notable here that we're actually proposing a 4.1, like a little over 4 FTE reduction to that department.

It's I think what we could do the most we could do without sacrificing safety or having major impacts to service levels.

Moving on to transportation operations and mobility.

This is the first example of, I think you may recall this from last year.

We have divisions with different names than you see attached here.

So these are legacy names for some of these programs.

Transportation operations and mobility is a legacy label for the public works division, better known as traffic and parking services.

So TEEP or TPS is what I'm going to just refer to it for here because I think that's more familiar.

Focuses on helping all people move freely around the city regardless of your mode of travel.

TPS runs a sign shop and impound lots, builds and installs signal boxes, manages 18,000 parking spots in the city, runs lots, ramps, and meters along with overseeing the city parking policy and leads traffic and mobility management.

They're the lead division for running our annual traffic calming application process to support calming measures throughout the city.

TPS has 117 positions divided into four business units, capital improvements, traffic field operations, street parking, and shared mobility or curbside management.

Alan Klugman serves as division director.

A little fun fact about the image is here.

This comes when the when the blue shirts come out, that's four doors open.

In the last three years, they've had over 3300 people come through the border maintenance facility to learn about city traffic operations in the sign shop and all the work that happens out there.

Okay, so TPS or transportation operations and mobility.

The graph shows our continued progress towards fully accessible signalized intersections around the city.

We're proposing an increase of $7.9 million for 2026.

What's important to recognize in this funding though is about $59 million is from the parking fund.

And those some of those costs, the cost increase or the budget increases we're proposing are directly related to capital improvements and deferred maintenance for some of our parking facilities.

Those funds are also, excuse me, that budget is also fully covered by people parking and using the parking facilities.

Most of the general fund reduction that we're talking about for TPS is comes from shifting $500,000 from the general fund to the capital fund.

Excuse me, it's actually 100,000 from the general fund and instead increasing the traffic calming for five to five hundred thousand into the capital funding program.

We'll talk more about that in a moment.

I think those are the key pieces for transportation operations and mobility.

Transportation planning design and engineering.

This is a combination, another legacy label, but combines two separate divisions known as transportation planning and programming or TPP, and transportation engineering and design, or TED or TED, at least the operating capital side of TED.

So this does get confusing.

I don't think it's super important, but if you want to ask more questions about that division, uh happy to respond afterwards.

TPP though has 33 divisions divided into two units who develop transportation policies and programs, build the capital improvement plan, coordinate public engagement on projects, and lead early project design, bringing projects up to 30% design to ensure they align with department goals as much as possible.

Kathleen Mail serves as interim TPP division director.

Ted kind of picks up where TE or TPP leaves off, leads and reviews project project design and engineering, manages construction projects and handles right-of-way and property management issues.

Ted has 11 positions.

Excuse me, that's not right.

Um that should be 111 positions.

Let me get back to you on that one and divide into five business units.

Yes, 111 positions in TED divided into five units.

Don Elwood serves as division director for TED.

All right.

So TPP and TED combined to plan and design our transportation system.

These divisions are the ones who created the transportation action plan, racial equity framework for transportation, uh, vision zero plans that guide our transportation investments, and then finalized project design and oversee construction projects like Hennepin Avenue South.

Notably that's on track and scheduled to open in early November.

Their metrics demonstrate the division's commitment to safety and equity for our transportation system.

The graph on the right shows the continued challenges to reducing fatal crashes in the city.

That's part of our vision zero work led through TPD TPDE with contributions from all transportation business line divisions.

An increase of $3.9 million is proposed for 2026.

This includes a $2.8 million increase to capital program for new staff to deliver that capital program, which is in total is over $310 million.

And then it $890,000 increase to the engineering lab for wages and higher material prices for things like asphalt.

Those are the kind of the main drivers of those increases.

All right.

Fleet Services Division has 73 positions, divided into four business units who are responsible for purchasing and maintaining our vehicle and large equipment fleet for all departments within the city, from sedans to snowplows and snooper trucks.

Chris Royston is the Fleet Services Division Director.

As we mentioned, fleet works across the city with all departments to match them with equipment that cost-effectively meets their needs.

In recent years, conversion to cleaner electric vehicles has been a priority, and the team has been working on the puzzle of fitting the right vehicle model to meet the customer needs and making sure that charging is available at different facilities around the city.

Preventative maintenance is also a focus to keep vehicles operating cleanly and efficiently to reduce costs and pollution.

The graph on the right shows progress towards increasing the number of EVs in the city fleet as a percent of all city vehicles.

We're currently at 9% of the total fleet being EVs.

When excluding vehicle types that currently lack electric options, or at least like readily available electric options like medium and heavy-duty trucks.

The percent of electric vehicles in the city fleet rises to 25%.

A 3% increase is proposed for 2026, again, driven by largely by staffing higher staffing costs, and increased costs to repair or replace totaled vehicles.

Solid waste and recycling.

Includes 150 positions divided into three business units who help keep our city clean.

The team pick up residential trash, recycling, organics, and yard waste for half the city and contracts with MRI, a private waste hauler for the other half.

MRI's service area is west of 35W from the Minnehaha Creek, up through North Minneapolis, and then east of the river from Broadway Street Northeast and 18th Avenue northeast to the northern city boundary.

They also support city cleanups and graffiti removal.

Nick Gerald is the division director.

So this division focuses on keeping the city clean for people and the environment.

They partner with Minneapolis Health Department, Hennepin County, and private haulers to work towards a zero waste future that includes waste reduction, reuse, and reuse and recycling.

The graph on the right shows garbage or waste that cannot be reused or recycled, is back to the same level as 2019 after jumps in 2021 and then reductions in 22 and 23.

While the city is still considered a national leader in waste reduction and recycling, more work is needed to make meaningful and lasting reductions.

An increase of 7 million is proposed for 2026, that is largely driven by higher wages and higher internal service fund charges for things like IT and other enterprise-wide internal services.

These funds are full like this uh funding is almost entirely paid uh through uh waste bills by users.

Sanitary and sewer and stormwater are managed by the surface water and sewers division to provide wastewater and stormwater management to protect the community and our water resources to support clean water and a thriving city.

Just for clarity, sanity sanitary sewer is water from faucets and toilets that needs to be treated at the Met Council facilities.

Stormwater is water that runs off of roofs, parking lots, and streets that is largely untreated.

Surface water and sewer has 138 positions who build and maintain the sewer and stormwater infrastructure, including gray assets like pipes and green infrastructure, like some engineering engineered vegetated medians and boulevards that detain water before it enters the stormwater system.

This is also referred to as green stormwater infrastructure.

Between the sanitary and stormwater systems, the division operates and maintains about 1,400 miles of underground infrastructure.

All the work in surface water and sewers is funded through utility fees.

Angie Kraft serves as division director for surface water and sewers.

So on the sanitary side, you know, sanitary sewers are aging.

The division uses and really leads the department in their use of a data-driven asset management approach to guide rehabilitation and replacement of sewer mains owned by the city.

System performance is regulated at the federal, state, and local levels, and backups, leaks or failures can have health or environmental impacts.

The graph here, we actually debated on this, how to visualize this because the work is because what they do is so impressive that there's zeros the last few years in terms of the number of combined sewer overflows.

So the national average you can see continues to hover between 15 and 20.

Our number has remained at zero since 2019, really suggesting the you know is evidence of all the work that we do and the great leadership in surface water and sewers.

Yep.

An increase of 117,000 is proposed for 2026 for sanitary sewers.

Let's move on to stormwater.

On the stormwater side, the stormwater fund is used to operate, maintain and improve our storm sewers.

Again, all costs are paid through utility bills.

The state recently required additional measures to comply with a federal EPA permit that created the need for more staff and resources to comply with additional terms.

The chart here reflects the total volume of phosphorus removal capacity built each year through green stormwater initiatives.

Up to 500 pounds of algae is produced from one pound of phosphorus.

In 2024, 20 pounds of phosphorus removal capacity was in was added to the city, preventing the growth of 10,000 pounds of algae.

An increase of 1.4 million dollars is proposed for 2026.

Led large again by wages, increased cost of wages, and internal fund, internal service fund charges, being the main drivers.

All right.

Final utility funded program is water.

So the water treatment and distribution services division ensures the city has clean water to drink and fire systems have adequate flow and pressure for public safety needs.

206 people in water are divided into four business units who build and maintain water infrastructure throughout the city and operate the water treatment plant for the city.

Again, the water division is funded entirely through utility bills.

The division includes a diverse mix of field operating technical staff who ensure we have some of the most affordable, cleanest, and best tasting water in the country.

Again, we were just awarded the best in glass as the best tasting water in Minnesota by a jury of their peers, peer water systems.

So kudos to water for all the work that they do.

Annika Bankston is water treatment and distribution services division director.

Alright, so water's focus is on operating a safe and secure drinking water system for the city.

The program is paid by utility fees.

And like other areas in public works, water is also dealing with the need to renew aging infrastructure, particularly water mains, while keeping rates affordable.

We continue to strategically invest in our system to ensure long-term performance without overburdening ratepayers.

Water mains are owned by the and maintained by the city and water service lines, the pipe that runs from the city water main to the street in the street to a property waters properties water meter are privately owned.

An increase of 660,000 is proposed for 2026 that is driven by higher staffing costs.

All right.

So our proposed reductions.

The following are proposed cuts to the public works budget, with a few exceptions.

Any cuts to the general fund budget for public works does have a direct and visible impact to core services.

Again, the total general fund budget for public works is less than 75 million.

So walking through these, I'm going to skip over the food and beverage, but moving on to budgeted reduction in transportation maintenance and repair.

We are proposing to eliminate one vacant service worker, FTE in transportation maintenance and repair, recognizing that there will be a reduction in service levels that could cause some delays in maintenance and repair work.

These are these will be non-safety activities, though, for things like work done on bridges, malls, plazas, and greenways, graffiti removal, litter pickup, mowing, weed control, shrub replacement, bridge washing, flushing, those types of activities.

It is notable that any service worker reduction will drop service levels, right?

Grass will grow longer, graffiti will linger, shrubs and wheat care will be deferred, and any additional reductions would impact core service delivery, including snow plowing and pothole filling.

We'll discuss the sidewalk snow and ice pilot number three on the chart on the next slide.

But number four, then is a non-staffing reduction in seal coating.

So seal coating is what we do to extend pavement life and prevent potholes by sealing the pavement surface, creating a protective barrier against environmental elements that are the primary cause of asphalt deterioration.

While this reduces some of our capacity, it avoids more immediate impacts to staffing or safety.

We can still achieve our $800,000 expectation for SEAL coating annually that's outlined in ordinance.

Number five would reduce the general fund portion of neighborhood traffic calming.

The $100,000 that we've had programmed for multiple years.

However, we propose adding $500,000 to the capital program for this work.

That would fund about 35 projects.

The program has matured and expanded so it is a better fit for the capital program, and it really looks more like other construction projects now that are funded through capital.

Next item here is a $200,000 reduction to the traffic safety camera pilot.

This would just delay hiring staff in regulatory services to renew review violations.

The reason we felt okay with this is it will give the program time to ramp up to ensure we're hiring the right number of staff to meet the need.

The program will be kicking off later this week.

So our thought is that we should see how things go before we maybe do that full hiring.

Finally, number seven is our previous annual contribution to support the Northern Lights Express Train to Duluth.

Funding for the project overall at the federal level is now questionable.

And under, yes, under the current administration.

So we suggest putting our membership here on hold.

Okay, Sidewalk Snow Ice.

I'll give you a sense of where we are too, because I know public works is a long one.

We have three slides left.

So for Sidewalk Snow and Ice, the pilot was developed to improve the accessibility and safety of public sidewalks, focusing on the pedestrian priority network and assisting residents who struggle to clear their walks due to age or disability, particularly in underserved areas.

Over the past two winters, we've identified that focusing on community-based programming has the potential to be a cost-effective strategy to maximize the goals of the pilot.

Specifically, the portion we're talking specifically about the what we call the senior snow clearing assistance pilot.

These are grants to neighborhood organizations to cost effectively provide services to seniors and those who need assistance and help.

Provided over 250 snow clearings over six snow events in the last two years.

This part of the pilot also helps build local connections and community capacity for neighbors to support neighbors.

Given the effectiveness of this part of the pilot, we suggest doubling capacity for senior snow clearing assistance in 2026, which is reflected by the $75,000 proposed.

The snow coordinator has also proven critical to advance this work.

They're needed to identify and collect data, understand barriers, identify a chart or chart a path forward.

They direct outreach and education to residents about sidewalk clearing and connect people with resources and services for sidewalk clearing.

They also serve as a resource for renters experiencing inadequate service from their property owners.

The three FTE reductions shown in slide 33 was not uh were not a new hires.

This is a combination of people pulled from other work to support the pilot.

And actually, staffing this work was a real scheduling challenge because these staff were needed for other critical winter work over the last two winters.

All right, finally, we started with uh one of our team members.

We're gonna end with another group of um group of folks.

Uh eight people uh plus two not pictured from our water team demonstrated quick thinking and compassion when they came across a resident uh involved in a serious car accident near a job site this summer.

Her vehicle was overturned and had struck a light pole.

Without hesitation, the crew sprang into action by helping the resident out of her overturned vehicle, providing immediate traffic control to ensure safety of the person and the area, and offering call and professional support during a very stressful incident.

I want to take this opportunity to thank Bill, Sean, Winter, Jeremiah, Rashawn, Brant, Brand, Mitch, Wyatt, Luke, and Scott.

They truly exemplify the teamwork, courage, and pride our staff take in delivering the core services that make Minneapolis a terrific place to live, work, and play.

And with that, I am happy to take any questions.

Thank you for that presentation, Director Sexton.

Colleagues, are there any questions or discussion items related to this presentation?

I will first recognize Councilmember Cashman, followed by Councilmember Rainville.

Thank you, Chair Chugtai.

Thank you, Director Sexton.

Lengthy presentation, but again, it's a huge budget, so it's important for us to get all the details.

I appreciate you going through it and everybody who put a lot of time into it.

And you know, it's great working with your department.

You're very steady, but also forward thinking and moving our city along towards our policy goals.

So I really appreciate that.

And instead of asking a lot of questions about your outcomes here, I'm going to just ask that we have a follow-up meeting to discuss that because I think it is important to understand what you're tracking and how in terms of metrics for outcomes.

But did want to give you the shout-out for reducing preventable worker injuries.

That's really great from a safety perspective, but also from a budget perspective, because it also helps reduce the settlement uh settlement costs, right?

So thank you so much for that.

Um, but just generally about your budget, I wanted to understand why the total budget's increasing 25 million uh when so many other departments, almost every other department is making cuts to their budget, so want to understand um where you're really finding the need for increases.

I know there's labor costs and supply chain costs.

Um I see the increased FTE count is going up by nearly 26 FTEs in public works, even after making five FTE reductions.

Um so I just want to understand a little bit more about where all these increases coming from.

Yeah, um Chair Chucktai, Councilmember Cashman.

Um, in terms of the overall increases, um, you're right, those are mostly driven by wage increase, increases for existing staff.

Um that's about 11, over 11 million dollars of those total increases come from wage increases.

Um, wage and fringe totals about 12 million dollars.

Uh operating cost increases really driven three and a half million almost is going to the Met Council to pay for treating our water.

Um, and then another four million is coming from sort of on the contractual side, largely driven by internal service charges for things like IT, information technology general fund, overhead, rent, fleet, and those other charges that we pay into the overall enterprise.

And then there's also some additional almost a half million dollars of that we pay back, or I guess 360,000 that we pay back to the general fund.

Um, there's there's a whole host of costs that come with those sort of the contractual costs of operating, many of which get paid back to other departments or to the city via the general fund.

Okay.

And then your second question about staffing.

Yep.

Yes, so the stat the positions that we're adding um, I believe are entirely, but I will confirm with you through the enterprise funds or capital fund.

So those are paid through through bonding or through utilities.

But a number of those 13, I think it is, that we are we're actually holding back on on the capital fund of those 2025, 25 point something uh positions, uh, and that's due to federal uncertainty.

We were very successful with the number of federal discretionary grants.

But given there is some uncertainty with those, um, we've elected to hold on as many as 13 of those positions.

Okay, thanks.

And then I see that there are about 138 vacancies, FTE vacancies in the department.

How many of those are long-term vacancies, like six months or more?

Sure, Chucktai, Councilmember Cashman.

Um I will have to follow up on it to get that exact number.

Okay, and then in a follow-up to why have they been vacant so long?

I guess the explanation for any of the long-term vacancies, why haven't they been filled?

Yeah.

Happy to Chair Chuck Tye and Councilmember Cashman.

I just to give you a yes, we will we will follow up with a memo.

I think it's important to note a couple things is that we don't want to we have some positions that are difficult to fill because of the technical expertise, for example.

We also, as I mentioned, try to use that detail opportunity to give people sort of an internal promotional opportunity in the temporary, which creates sometimes some positions that stay vacant.

Um and then we do meet some of those the business needs through salary savings of those vacancies to hire outside trades or temporary work workers to to meet the business needs of the department.

But we will follow up with more information on that.

Okay.

Yes.

Thank you.

And then I just have a couple questions about TPS.

Well, actually, basically, why are we not changing TOM to TPS if that's the new name of the.

I just don't understand why we can't just call it TPS now.

Sure Chucktai, Councilmember Cashman.

Um that is on our list of things to work with uh the budget office.

Gotcha to see if we can find a solution to that.

Okay.

Thanks.

So on this for this department, um, I know it's so important to modernize our intersections to improve traffic flow for all the new changes we're making to our streets.

So I'm wondering if we've made any transit signal priority improvements since the state work group concluded, and or any other smart signal technology.

Yeah.

I'm looking around.

There's Alan.

I might invite our Alan Klugman, our division director for TPS or Transportation Operations and Mobility to come up and answer those questions.

Great.

I guess it's afternoon, good afternoon, Chair Chuck Tai, Councilmember Cashman, other members of the committee.

Um, could I actually repeat the question?

I think we got most of it, but I want to make sure.

So since the state work group on transit signal priority concluded, have we made any transit signal priority improvements or any other smart signal technology?

Right.

Okay.

Um so uh Councilmember Cashman referred to there was a state work group on transit priority, I believe it started in 2023, maybe 2024, it went for about a year.

I was a member of that committee.

Um an outcome of that committee was to recommend some changes in how agencies in the whole metropolitan region looked at transit signal priority.

Um we have not done large changes.

We've continued to advance the work we're doing.

That's what I would say.

Um we're now up to over 820 signals.

We have 190 signals with bus transit signal priority, and we have 40 signals with light rail signal priority.

So we have about 30 percent of our signals with transit priority.

That's the third highest percentage in the nation.

Um there's only two cities above us.

So we're very, very active in that.

I think um a large finding from the work group, two-part finding.

One was that we're kind of at the forefront of this, and two is that there are some emerging technologies that we want to look into, and that would be for future discussions, possibly future budget years.

Uh, but the technology is possibly moving from directly having equipment into field to more of a cloud-based system, and that's the kind of thing we're looking at for the future.

So I don't mean to get super technical.

Just want to let you know that we continue to advance the system.

I'm very proud of the work our team has done.

Um again, 30% of our signals do have transit signal priority, and with every one of the uh bus rapid transit lines that you see coming online, B line earlier this year, E-line coming here in another month or so.

Um, we've continued to expand the size and scope of our system.

So that's maybe point one.

I think point two, you spoke to maybe other smart signals and other technologies.

Um we continue to look at those suites of equipment in the past year.

We actually upgraded our central traffic control system.

You were at the shop last year.

Um if you came this year, you would see a new map up on the screen.

We continue to stay up to up to speed with the latest technology in terms of how we operate, monitor, manage the signals and operate them.

Um so we do keep keep up with that new technology.

Uh the next thing we're looking at, maybe I'll conclude with this, is the future with autonomous vehicles, connected vehicles.

We're looking towards that future.

Um, we're with MINDET on the work groups.

We stay abreast of what's happening in that industry.

We do feel that'll be coming to our city, but probably not in the next year or two, but we're kind of prepping our equipment for that.

Just one quick example.

Um, when we put in our traffic signal cabinets, we're making them a little bit bigger than we used to historically, because we know there's new equipment that will be housing in those.

We may not even know what all that equipment is now, but we're trying to future proof our system for that.

So we are keeping a tune of what's coming in that realm, and that's a real exciting development in our industry.

Thank you.

One follow-up here is about whether the traffic safety camera technology that we're installing starting this week, if that same technology could be expanded to do automatic parking enforcement that would, you know, help traffic control with all of the illegal parking that's happening that we're just not enforcing because we don't have capacity.

Yep.

Um Chair Chuck Ty, Councilmember Cashman, members of the committee, I think the short entry is probably not with the equipment that we selected for the camera.

Uh safety pilot program.

Uh there are other technologies and equipments that are used for more of the license plate recognition and issuing of citations for parking.

And a large of it has to do with where you would set up the camera for what it is the camera's looking at.

So it'd probably be a different suite of equipment, very similar, but different locations and different goal of what we'd want to accomplish with that.

Okay.

Thank you so much.

We'd be happy to follow up with you on that in the climate infrastructure committee.

And then the last um couple questions are about fleet services.

So just want to understand why we missed our fleet emissions, greenhouse gas reduction targets in 2023 and 2024, and if we're expecting those similar trends or trying to address those trends this year and next year.

Chair Shakti, Councilmember Catchman, I want to introduce Chris Royston, our fleet services division director.

Good morning.

Chair Check Tai, Councilmember Cashman.

Could you please repeat the question?

Yep.

Why did we miss our uh greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets in our fleet services in 2023 and 2024?

And how are we anticipating those trends changing this year and next year?

Thank you.

Um the challenge is as we're ordering the vehicles, um, they have to come in, obviously, and then they have to be upfitted.

Uh once we get the vehicles upfitted and ready to go into service, um, we've been ordering quite a few EVs.

And we want to make sure that operationally that we are sound, and so we're holding back the vehicles that will be going out of service to make sure that the vehicles that are coming to service the EVs specific specifically uh will meet operational needs to confirm it and also to make the end users more comfortable with the vehicles, uh, and then knowing that they still have the ability to put into operation, put back in operation their internal combustible engine vehicles, their ice vehicles.

Uh so what that does is it increases the vehicle count, which messes with the math as far as the emissions, because we're adding vehicles to the fleet without necessarily taking vehicles out of the fleet right away.

In addition to that, when we're adding EVs, so case in point, um, this year we added over a hundred electric vehicles to the fleet.

Those electric vehicles require charging stations.

Those charging stations uh there's a whole procurement process that goes into place, and then there are a construction process just with the with with those.

And so you have to bring all of that together.

They're bringing in the vehicles to upfitting the vehicles, to getting the charging infrastructure in place for the vehicles.

Typically, the city uh we're buying about 30 vehicles a year.

And like I said last year, we bought over uh a hundred EVs alone and a hundred and thirty vehicles all together, because keep in mind during 2021-22, the supply chains were shut down, and we weren't getting the vehicles, the manufacturers weren't able to provide us the vehicles we needed.

And so when the supply chains have opened up in 24 and 25, uh, we're faced with adding um uh significant number of vehicles to the fleet.

Okay, so am I understanding correct that we added all these EVs, but we're not yet using them.

We're using them now, but when we're doing the math for the uh greenhouse gases emissions, um some of the vehicles were not in service yet, but we they still count it, right?

We uh you you I mentioned that typically we we bring in about 30 vehicles a year.

At one point in time we had over a hundred vehicles that were in a process of being upfitted, right?

And so that took almost seven months.

So we had the vehicles, but they couldn't go into use because they needed to be upfitted.

Upfitted is whether they'd be adding uh emblems on the side or equipment inside in the case of squat cars, you're putting in, taking out back seats, putting in cages, putting in radios, um and other safety components.

It could be a traffic control vehicle that requires light bars.

Um you have to buy that stuff.

And there's lead times with it, and then it has to come in, and then it has to be upfitted.

Um in this case, uh we can't do all of the upfitting uh in internally, so we had to use contractual services to do the upfitting, but because the supply chains were shut down, all of the other municipalities were buying at the same time, and they were utilizing the same upfitters uh that we were and it took a really long time if that makes any sense.

Yep, that makes a lot of sense.

Okay, thanks.

And then just to conclude here, MPD vehicles are included in the fleet, right?

Uh police vehicles are included in this.

And do you know which, like what amount of the MPD vehicles are electric vehicles at this point?

I do.

Uh they are included in the fleet.

There are roughly 350 total uh MPD vehicles, of which they have six EV vehicles that are they're using for uh investigations, and we've just added our first uh six squad cars that are EVs.

They're not in service yet.

They're currently being upfitted.

Uh initially we're gonna we're only gonna put three into service immediately.

We anticipate those being in the service.

Hopefully by end of the year, the challenge there again is adding dedicated EV infrastructure at the locations they're gonna operate them out of.

Okay.

So I'm I'm hearing here that we have about nine percent of our total fleet being EVs, but we only have about one percent of MPD's fleet being EVs.

That's a fair representation.

Okay.

Thank you so much, Chair.

Thank you.

Next, I'll recognize um actually before we continue with the Q, I'll note that we've been joined in this committee by Council President Payne.

Um we've got two more speakers in queue, Director.

Um so next, I'll recognize Councilmember Rainville, followed by Council Member Palmasano.

Thank you for your patience, Director Sexton.

I just wanted to pass on some compliments from several of your staff members.

Uh Ethan Frawley, I had the opportunity to uh join him in testimony for the red light, speed light cameras, and so good to see that's being started, and he's really good.

He's very good employee, very effective.

I also wanted to uh shout out Katie White for her work on 13th Avenue.

As I'm in that neighborhood, people are very appreciative of how thorough she was in her explanations and her presence there was very important.

And then lastly, uh you have a superhero on your staff, and that is Alan Klugman.

And Alan is always there with my very uh difficult questions and ask, and he's just uh a joy to work with.

So uh please know that Alan is a very very vital part.

And I hope when you talk about institutional knowledge leaving, that he's not part of that institutional knowledge that might be leaving.

Thank you.

Chair, council member uh I hope so too.

Awesome, thank you.

Um, and then finally I'll recognize Councilmember Wonzano.

Thank you, Director Sexton, for this presentation.

I'm aware of the time, but just a couple comments and then a couple questions.

Um I really like your mission statement on page five.

And I was struck by how the infrastructure and services provided by public works actually supports the other 21 departments in our city.

You can't have public safety without safe and efficient streets.

You can't have economic vitality without orderly waste pickup and a commitment to climate reduction strategies.

You can't have neighborhood vitality without clean water and best practices on stormwater management.

Um I also like that in your presentation you reflected your comments on a grand scale from huge changes to Hennepin Avenue to the simple replacement of lead water lines that you're making a lot of progress on.

Um they're very different, but they're both really important in their own ways, and they're both meaningful to residents.

But another thing that really struck me, if I'm reading the budget book correctly, and you just confirmed in your presentation, I think, was that out of your 486 million dollar department budget, only about 74 million comes from the general fund.

Did I read that correctly?

Chair Chucktaya, Councilmember Palzano, that is correct.

You know, the general fund component is what we as city council can influence.

The things funded out of the general fund are core city services that we talk about a lot.

It's about filling potholes and snow plowing and repairing street lights and maintaining traffic signals.

Any cuts or earmarks that we might make to that part of your budget means cutting staff in an immediate and direct impact to the on-the-ground services for residents of Minneapolis.

I bring that up because time and time again over the years.

I hear council members saying public works won't notice a cut because you have such a large budget.

But that's just not true.

Only a small amount of your budget is actually even under our purview.

And I just want to caution us as we move forward that we really have to be careful to support the livability of our city.

And these are the things in your presentation that I hear about from residents when I speak to them from all over the city.

Um by moving the ongoing funding for traffic calming from the general fund to the CIP, um, does that mean it will have to compete for funding each year within the capital budget, or is that somehow stable or as stable as the general fund?

Yeah, um, Chair Choctae and Councilmember Palmasano, I think uh I'm gonna take advantage of having one of our capital program experts here in the room, maybe help respond to that.

Um bring up uh deputy director and city engineer Jenny Hager.

Hi, Deputy Director Hager.

Um can you help us understand is traffic combing then in this year's CIP budget?

Uh good afternoon, uh Chair and uh members of the committee.

My name's Jennifer Hager, serving currently as the deputy director and city engineer.

And the answer to your question, short answer is yes.

We have proposed uh neighborhood traffic calming to be part of the CIP.

Because that came a little bit later in the process for developing this current CIP, you don't see that as a standalone program.

It's um embedded in an existing traffic safety program, and we are proposing to create its own capital budget request and related number in this next development of the CIP so that that shows as a line item, neighborhood traffic calming, and just like some of our other ongoing programs within the capital improvement program, that would have ongoing funding associated with that each year.

Thank you.

That's helpful because I think it's largely a program that we all um have a lot of interest in and have enjoyed having here in our city, especially to direct residents to give that feedback more directly for projects that they want implemented.

Um Director Sexton had spoken about the public works utility fees and it was on slide 38.

Um, this feels like a pretty steep monthly increase and um could impact those who can least afford it the most, right?

This is my same concerns I have about franchise fees.

Um have these amounts been verified by a fee study or some type of calculation for the increase in public works utility fees, or who pays those really?

I think that ratepayers pay them.

Yeah, Chair Chuck, Councilmember Palmazano.

Um, yes, the utility fees are all paid through by ratepayers.

Um, it is our goal to look nationally at those rate increases and what's happening around the country.

We traditionally have been um in the lower end of those national average increases, um, and we always try to keep them uh within the sort of five to seven percent range to make sure that we are doing that and staying ahead of the curve in terms of the affordability of our utilities.

I can provide more information on those sort of averages and that affordability index that we use, but uh that is our goal, and traditionally we've been able to achieve it.

So would you say then that for this next year we might be average in public utility fees?

Or we're still under Sure Chuck Tai Council Member Palmzano.

Um I'd want to follow up with more specifics on that, unless we have to talk about that.

I think we could why don't we give one example from water if that's okay?

If we have division director uh for water treatment and distribution services, Annika Bankston.

Thank you, Director Bankston.

Hello.

Uh once again, my name is Annika Bankston.

I'm the division director for water treatment and distribution services.

Um, so in regards to um water storm and sanitary sewer fees, um, as you pointed out, those are paid by obviously our ratepayers and billpayers.

Uh part of the rate setting process is um basically looking at revenue requirements to do um to deliver the level of service and the quality of services that we do, and then perform a rate allocation to understand who is fair, you know, how to allocate those needs accordingly by our customer base.

Uh with that, we determine the rates needed, and then we do do affordability calculations and estimations.

And one of the levels we look at that's becoming an industry standard is something called uh the household affordability matrix.

And you actually look at uh the uh prevalence of poverty in a given service area and look at the amount that a ratepayer would pay for those water services.

Uh industry benchmarks are around seven percent uh for the lowest quintile of household income, and uh collectively with water, wastewater, and stormwater, we're at about three and a half percent.

So that's one uh benchmark among others that we look at to make sure that we're staying reasonable and appropriate.

Thank you.

As usual, Director Bankston, you're a wealth of information.

I don't think I need more follow-up than what we just got.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Awesome, thank you.

Um any other questions, council member?

Wonderful.

With that, um, I think we've exhausted discussion and questions for you, Director Sexton.

Thank you so much to you and to your leadership team for coming in today.

I think most of them are here for your presentation.

I will direct the clerk to file that um report.

And with that, we have concluded all business to come before the committee this morning, this afternoon.

Um, and without objection, we stand adjourned until our next meeting, which is this Friday, October 3rd at 10 a.m.

in these chambers where we will receive presentations um prepared by the mayor's office and the department of neighborhood safety and the Minneapolis Fire Department.

Thank you, everyone.