The Finance and Economic Development Standing Committee met on September 16, 2026, to consider 13 legislative items and one discussion item related to the city's fiscal operations, transparency, and community investments. The committee approved most items, forwarded one to council without recommendation, and received updates on ARPA fund expenditure and future presentations.
To call to order the finance and economic development standing committee meeting this time. Um Adam Claire take care of chamber emergency evacuation. Upon activation of the emergency alarm signal, all persons should immediately exit the building. Please use the exits to the left or right front of the council chamber or the north or west stairwells outside of the rear doors of the chamber. Do not use elevators or escalators. At the exit in the building, security would direct everyone down Knife Street to the fenced area located between Clay and Lee Streets. Able persons should assist visually and hearing a pair of visitors with exiting the building. Persons wishing to speak during the public comment period andor public hearings are journey allowed three minutes to speak. Persons appearing before the committee are not allowed to campaign for public office, promote private business ventures, use language of a personal nature which installs or demeans any person, including comments directed at public officials or staff members that are not related to the official duties or just the question staff members directly. All questions are to be directed to the committee chair. Fayette here to the gun lines may result in speakers forfeiting any remaining time and further disciplinary action as necessary, which can include bar from attendance at future meetings of the committee for a period of six months. Madam Chair concludes announcements. Thank you, Madam Clerk. We will proceed with the public comment period for those that are here that would like to address the committee on items that are not on the docket. Is anyone that would like to provide comment or anything not on today's agenda? Seeing none, the public comment period is now closed. Thank you, Madam Clerk. Minutes for approval. The minutes to be approved from the July 15th, 2026 finance economic development standing committee meeting. If there are no amendments of corrections, then those meeting minutes stand approved as presented. Those minutes have been approved. Thank you, Madam Clerk. We will proceed with the docket as it is presented. Item one, ordinance 2026 081 to amend city code concerned publication of the city's payment register for the purpose of promoting transparency and accountability in the expenditure of public funds by providing public access to information regarding payments made by the city to vendors for goods and services and reimbursement to employees while protecting confidential and personal information as required by law that papers before the committee. Today I'm here to reiterate the administration's commitment to provide maximum proactive transparency to the public, especially with our money, while honoring legitimate privacy concerns and following privacy laws better addressed through the FOIA process. We learned a lot through the process of producing the fiscal year 25 payment register, as I've previously shared at the last committee meeting, which has informed our proposed amendments to our ordinance. We also adjusted our proposal based on the committee's questions and guidance back in June. So I have provided a new chart for your review since the comparative chart provided before the amendments were actually introduced, which was in your briefing, are actually no longer accurate. So based off of the careful work we've done, we now have a better understanding of what it takes to prepare this payment register. Um and it's based off of our own financial records, the actual realities of the systems that we have, which fields of data are standardized, which are not, and who within the organization has access to which pieces of data. And really, we, as you can see from the amended chart, are only removing a few pieces of information based on that information. So our proposed amendments to the current ordinance first change the scope to vendor payments and employee reimbursements based on the high volume of privacy laws governing the other payments to individuals. We must protect personal information and ensure legal compliance, and we can do this based on a more automated, predictable process, not by relying on time-consuming manual redactions with the risk of human error. Again, I want to note that the individual payment information still does remain available, but we strongly recommend against mandating proactive disclosure through city code because of the increased risk of sharing someone's protected private information. We are proposing to remove invoice description and add account description. Invoice description is a free form text field that staff write into on their own. Through the process of producing the fiscal year 25 register, we learned that the invoice description field was actually mostly left blank. The instances that were not blank many times required manual review and had to be redacted for the reasons already discussed. So instead, cost center, which was already there, and account description, which we're adding in, are more helpful for understanding what was purchased because you can tie to the budget with cost center, and you read a description of a particular payment from the account description, things like office supplies and stationary uniforms and safety supplies, et cetera. We are removing fund code and keeping fund description because the fund code does not match any other information that the general public has access to. It's really just four digits that are used internally. And so we don't think that it adds information and does actually or doesn't add meaningful information, but does add the risk of things like AI being able to mimic payments and so on and so forth. Payment document used is a field that does not actually exist in the original data that we find in the ordinance, the original ordinance. And so we believe it is intended to satisfy the same information we're disclosing in type of disbursement. So the this was the one that previously at the committee we talked about payment document. We actually don't know exactly what was intended in the original ordinance, but we believe the intent of payment document was just to know is it a check, is it a wire transfer, et cetera? So we are keeping in that information in type of disbursement. And then we also adjusted the timeline for publication to be more specific, addressing a maximum of 60 days after close of the month's payments. So I'm gonna steal a line from Vice Chair Jones, and I'm gonna say it with my chest and say this is our best and final proposal, which from our perspective is only making a few adjustments to the information proactively shared with significant benefit of protecting individual privacy and deploying the city's resources proportionately for public benefit. Thank you, Miss Lawson.