Good afternoon, and welcome to Pittsburgh City Council's cable cast post agenda on the controller's audit on code enforcement.

I'm Councilperson Bob Sharland.

I'll be chairing today's uh post agenda discussion today.

For the record, we're joined by Councilwoman Celinetro and Councilperson Strasberger.

Other members may be joining us shortly.

I don't believe we have anyone online yet.

So this I believe this is actually my first piece of legislation here.

Um as a former staffer, I spent a lot of time in courtrooms watching our code enforcement process and watching a process that I I don't believe I don't believe is perfect, and I believe there's a lot of room for improvement in that.

Um we've got a whole bunch of different magistrates that all have different different rules, but we also have essentially three different departments that interact with the system.

And for me, this was a really important piece of data that we wanted to help guide our enforcement practices.

We want to see in the city um folks do things the right way, uh but we also need to know where we do have sticks, you know, to actually make people do things the right way.

And frankly, often that just doesn't happen.

So uh this kind of idea guided my quality of life legislation that I introduced and we passed early in my term or my first year here.

And uh this report here, that this audit um did take some time and is is incredibly thorough.

We wanted to walk through what the results say, and hopefully this can guide us in feature discussions on how we can improve our enforcement practices in the city of Pittsburgh here.

So I'm joined today with uh an esteemed panel, and I will uh give you guys all kind of an opportunity to introduce yourselves, and then we'll move to the presentation from the controller's office and open up for responses from the rest of our guests and questions from members here.

So that'll be the plan for the day here.

So without further ado.

Yes.

Um good afternoon.

My name's Rachel Heisler.

I'm the controller for the City of Pittsburgh.

Hello, I'm Leah Jung.

I'm the chief audit officer at the controller's office.

Hi, I'm Katie Weddick, I'm the senior right-of-way manager with Domi.

I'm Brian Ralston.

I'm the right-of-way utility supervisor for Domi.

Hi, I'm Robert Columbus.

I'm the assistant director of code enforcement for the Department of Permits Licenses and Inspections with the City of Pittsburgh.

I'm Anna Bagel, I'm the environmental enforcement coordinator for the Department of Public Works.

Marcel Newman, Assistant Director of Public Works.

So we have uh PLI, environmental services, and Domi all represented here.

All of our um enforcement agencies that that work with this process here.

So with that, I would ask the controller to open up and for Lee's presentation afterwards.

Thank you, Councilman.

Um so this was a citywide code violations audit that again was instigated by Councilman Charland.

Um it was a performance audit, which means we're looking at how the process works and how it can be improved.

We looked at the processes of enforcing city code violations by PLI code violations at PLI, DPW, and DOME from beginning to end.

As we all know, city code exists to keep people safe, to keep people healthy, and to keep things clean.

So it's important that we enforce all of these laws consistently and across the board across the board.

So with that, I'm going to turn things over to Chief Audit Officer Leah Zhang, um, who conducted this audit with uh our audit staff in the controller's office.

And just to highlight this, um, in the three-year scope of the audit, there were 67,631 complaints that originated from 311.

And of those case files we reviewed, 12,480 went all the way to court.

So that's the scope of what we're looking at today.

And with that, I'll turn it over to my colleague Lee.

Thank you again.

Thank you, Controller Heisler.

Um, I'll go ahead and share my screen and present an overview of the audit that we performed.

Um we should populate on the screen here momentarily.

Um code violations.

The objectives or procedures of our audit focused on the two items that are listed on the screen here.

The first one being the 10 items listed on the resolution 18 of 2024, which was referenced by Councilman Charland in his opening.

That resolution listed on starting on page two, 10 specific items that council wanted us to look at as part of the audit.

And then the second bullet there is um testing, uh, which is auditor procedures on some aspects that the departments are responsible for, including inputs, timeliness, and documentation of case files.

I'll go through each of the 10 items from the resolution and overview of the results therein.

Um the first one, resolution item number one is uh a request for us to um provide the data on the number of um 311 complaints per department as controller Heisler introduced, those departments are PLI, DPW, and DOME, and those three departments you can see listed um in table one here with the totals for each department accordingly.

This is just the total number of 311 complaints routed to each of the departments.

Of particular note, you can see that DPW did not have any data in 21 and 22.

That's simply because they were not integrated into the Computronic system until mid-2023.

Table two is a further breakdown still of item number one from the resolution, except with a little bit more detail in terms of what kinds of uh code violations are routed to each department specifically, and table two starts with PLI.