Minneapolis 2026 Budget Committee Meeting - October 6, 2025
Minneapolis 2026 Budget Committee Meeting - October 6, 2025
This meeting of the Budget Committee, chaired by Aisha Chugtai, convened to review the mayor's recommended 2026 budgets for the City Attorney's Office, Performance Management and Innovation (PMI), and Finance and Property Services (FPS). The meeting included presentations from each department head, discussion of performance metrics, risks, budget reductions, and questions from council members.
Public Comments & Testimony
- No public testimony was taken during this session.
Discussion Items
- City Attorney's Office Budget: City Attorney Kristen Anderson presented the 2026 budget, highlighting achievements including low turnover, paperless technology adoption, and success with the MDHR settlement agreement, 16 extreme risk protection orders (ERPOs) issued, and major litigation wins protecting federal grants. She noted budget reductions totaling nearly 7% over two years, including elimination of 3.3 FTEs, reduction of food/ beverage and contractual services, and elimination of paid law clerk positions. Risks include increased workload without new resources and potential for burnout. Council President Payne asked about improvements to Brady compliance; Deputy City Attorney David Bernstein explained new technology (Prosecutor by Carpel) and a process for disclosing officer discipline records. Councilmember Palmasano praised the success of diversion programs that saved workhouse expenses. Councilmember Chowdhury inquired about ERPOs; Anderson confirmed the office petitioned for 17, with 16 granted. On law clerk pay elimination, Anderson stated the office deemed law clerks non-essential and believes the office remains attractive enough to recruit unpaid law clerks.
- Performance Management & Innovation (PMI) Budget: Director Kira Hasbarg presented PMI's 2026 budget, noting a $500,000 decrease in contractual services (one-time funding for Safe and Thriving Communities pilot work) and a $25,000 reduction in technical assistance funds. PMI has 9 FTEs and zero vacancies. Key achievements include completing six projects year-to-date, 83% on-time delivery, and a 98.2% partner satisfaction rate. The department is developing a CitySTAT program (pilot planned for 2026) and has launched Innovation U training courses. Councilmember Koski asked about CitySTAT vs. Outcomes Minneapolis; Hasbarg explained CitySTAT is more real-time and cross-departmental. Councilmember Palmasano noted progress in embedding performance metrics across departments. Councilmember Cashman asked about the mayoral priorities dashboard cost and web traffic; Hasbarg agreed to follow up via memo. Cashman also inquired about intended outcomes of the juvenile deflection and traffic control pilots; Hasbarg stated the juvenile deflection pilot aims to keep youth out of the justice system entirely, and the traffic control pilot restores non-injury crash response services and frees police for priority calls.
- Finance and Property Services (FPS) Budget: CFO Dushani Dai presented FPS's 2026 budget of $65.1 million (1.2% increase), with 293 FTEs and 12 vacancies. The department received the GFOA Award for Budget Presentation and the 50th consecutive award for financial reporting. Bond rating remains AAA. FPS is implementing an ERP (Workday) project and has absorbed increased banking and credit card fees. Budget reductions include a $1,800 food and beverage cut and passing $900,000 in credit card fees to utility customers. Three positions were added for property services. Councilmember Palmasano recognized Budget Director Jane DeSenza for a recent industry award and asked about communication of the credit card fee change to customers; the question was noted for follow-up.
Key Outcomes
- Presentations from City Attorney, PMI, and FPS were received and filed.
- Council members requested follow-up memos on: PMI mayoral priorities dashboard cost and maintenance (2025, 2026); web traffic data for PMI online tools; and communications plan for utility credit card fee changes to customers.
- No formal votes were taken; the committee will reconvene for a second public hearing on the 2026 recommended budget later that day.
Meeting Transcript
Good morning. My name is Aisha Chugtai, and I'm the chair of the budget committee. I'm going to call to order our adjourned meeting for Monday, October 6th, 2025. Before we begin the meeting, I want to offer a friendly reminder to all members, staff, and the public that these meetings are broadcast live to enable greater public participation. These broadcasts include real-time captioning as a further method to increase the accessibility of our proceedings to the community. Therefore, all speakers need to be mindful of the rate of their speech so that our captioners can fully capture and transcribe all comments for the broadcast. We ask all speakers to moderate the speed and clarity of their comments. At this time, I'll ask the clerk to call the role so we can verify the presence of a quorum. Council President Payne, present. Councilmember Wandsley is absent. Rainville. Rosa. Vita? Present. Allison is absent. Osman is absent. Cashman. Present. Jenkins is absent. Chavez? Present. Chowdry is absent. Present. Vice Cherkowski. Present. Chair Churchet. Present. We have eight 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 three presentations related to the mayor's recommended 2026 budget from the city attorney's office, performance management and innovation, and the finance and property services departments. I'll first invite City Attorney Kristen Anderson to join us and begin her presentation. Welcome. Thank you, Madam Chair, Council members. Again, I'm Kristen Anderson. I'm the city attorney, and I am very pleased to be here to uh explain our office budget and give you an overview. I'd also like to introduce uh members of my leadership team, uh Linda Roberts, who is our office uh director of operations, uh David Bernstein, who is our deputy of our criminal division, and Dan Abelson, who is our deputy of our civil division. Um I'll just go through the slides. Um the first slide really depicts where we fall as the city attorney's office in the city enterprise. We are a very, very unique department insofar as we serve both the administration and the city council. And here is a high-level overview of our organizational structure. As you see, uh I have uh five direct reports, and as well uh each division of the office, the civil division, and the criminal division each has managing attorneys in the civil division. We are in the structure showing three managing attorneys. One of those we are um are using the budget towards the mayor's recommended budget reductions, and I'll talk about that a little later. Our mission, vision, and values as an office. High level is to equitably seek justice, embrace accountability, and protect the interests of the Minneapolis community. We as a an office came together with a staff-led initiative to develop our mission, vision, and values in 2024. We use the acronym ICARE, integrity, communication, collaboration, accountability, respect, equity, and excellence. As a department, we have work expectations that are directly tied to our mission, vision, and values so that we are all held accountable to these values that we have developed together. So now I want to talk about both our achievements and our risks, and I'm gonna spend a uh a while on our achievements.
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