Good morning.

My name is Aisha Chugtai, and I'm the chair of the budget committee.

I'm gonna call to order our adjourned meeting for Friday, October 3rd, 2025.

Before we get before we begin the meeting, I want to offer a friendly reminder to all members, staff, and the public that these meetings are broadcast live to enable greater public participation.

These broadcasts include real-time captioning as a further method to increase the accessibility of our proceedings to the community.

Therefore, all speakers need to be mindful of the rate of their speech so that our captioners can fully capture and transcribe all comments for the broadcast.

We ask all speakers to moderate the speed and clarity of their comments.

At this time, I'll ask the clerk to call the role so we can verify the presence of a quorum.

Councilmember Payne is absent.

Wandsley.

Present.

Rainbow.

Present.

Vita.

Present.

Ellison is absent.

Osman is absent.

Cashman is absent.

Jenkins.

Absent.

Chavez.

Present.

Chowdry.

Present.

Palmasano.

Present.

Vice Chair Koskey.

Present.

Chair Chugtai.

Present.

That is eight members present.

Let the record reflect that we have a quorum.

I will also remind my colleagues that we will be using speaker management today, so please make sure to sign in.

Today we have three presentations related to the mayor's recommended 2026 budget from the mayor's office, the neighborhood safety department, along with the fire department.

To begin our first presentation, I will invite Grace Waltz, the mayor's chief of staff, um, to join us and begin.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Uh good morning, Chair Shugtai, Vice Chair Koski, and members.

My name is Grace Waltz, and I am the chief of staff in the office of Mayor Fry.

Um my presentation will be relatively brief as the bulk of the work of the mayor's office is focused on ensuring Mayor Frye is accessible to residents and providing support and support and guidance to departments across the enterprise.

I will start with a brief overview of our office reporting structure.

Our team is split between three verticals operations, which is inclusive of scheduling and constituent services, communications, which is inclusive of our press office and community engagement and policy, where each of our policy advisors has a portfolio that corresponds to city departments, uh, but maintain the flexibility to meet the needs of the varying issues that come into our office.

The mission of our office is very simple uh to improve the daily lives of Minneapolis residents and to provide clear and consistent direction to the cabinet and administrative departments.

Um as you all have seen before, Mayor Fry's policy priorities are centered around improving community safety and police relations, uh, creating more affordable housing, bolsting bolstering climate action and public health, growing our economy through inclusive policies and good governance.

Uh I will spend a minute highlighting some achievements from the past year.

Uh earlier this year, we revamped our website and intake process, uh, in addition to making the mayor's priorities easier to read and understand.

Uh, we now have an archive of speeches, uh, weekly newsletters, and a link to the mayoral dashboard.

Um, additionally, we've made process improvements to the ways people can request a meeting with Mayor Fry or invite him to an event and expanded the ways you can request recognition from the mayor, including proclamations, letters, or certificates of recognition.

Uh, none of these are flashy changes, um, but they are all part of the small but um impactful ways our team works to make sure uh the mayor's office is more accessible to residents.

Um also highlight a few metrics from our operations team.

Uh, year to date, we're at over 7,000 for constituent outreach, so that's calls, emails, and online submissions, um, and nearly 800 meeting requests to date for the mayor.

Uh this year we have also expanded and diversified the mayor's community cabinet.

Uh so this is a group of stakeholders uh from various groups and neighborhoods that meets monthly to provide input and on-the-ground experience to help inform Mayor Fry's position on various issues and let them know, uh let him know what they are hearing out in community.

Finally, in partnership with PMI and departments across the enterprise, we launched the mayoral priorities dashboard.

This dashboard resulted uh from the mayor and city leaders wanting to be able to track trends over various priority areas.

Um and initially it was actually only intended to be internal facing, uh, but once we saw what PMI was able to design, we thought this could be a useful tool for residents.

Um as you can see, we're tracking stats in community safety.

Uh so that includes crime trends and response time trends, recruitment.

Uh for that we take a holistic view of citywide hiring trends, uh, homeless response, uh, so how many times HRT are doing site uh visits, 311 call trends, economic recovery, um, opioid response.

Uh so that tracks participants in the opioid settlement program and the number of Narcan boxes distributed from the vending machine and climate action.